Northern Spy

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-8

Part 1, Chapters 9-13

Part 2, Chapters 14-22

Part 2, Chapters 23-35

Part 3, Chapter 36-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Mundanity of Civil Warfare

Content Warning: This section describes depictions of civil warfare, terrorism, and the aftermath of the Northern Ireland conflict (also known as the Troubles), which feature extensively in the novel.

When conceptualizing the events of war, a reader’s tendency might be to imagine the battles, the carnage, notable figures and dates, as well as the casualties. Flynn Berry focuses her narrative on something entirely different in Northern Spy. What she strives to portray is an accurate depiction of mundane life between headline-worthy events—the moments that go unrecorded in history for their banality and quotidian nature. The author shows how it is this inclusion of normalcy in warfare that often carries its victims through to the end by giving them the motivation needed to make it through the chaos and danger.

For Tessa, her role as a mother becomes the touchstone that tethers her through the struggles and violence she faces as she becomes more intimately enmeshed with the IRA. Being an informant is rather antithetical to Tessa’s person: She is a civilian, a single mother, and though she has an invested interest in politics, her career as a news editor marks her as someone who is staunchly on the sidelines of political occurrences—a bystander, in other words, rather than an active participant in Northern Ireland’s conflict like her sister. When she’s made to become an informer out of love for Marian, it carves a secondary life for her, one filled with fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and far too many brushes with death. Even when she meets with Eamonn, someone who is allegedly on ‘her side,’ fear qualifies their encounter: “There’s no reason for me to be scared, but I’m having trouble breathing. This degree of fear seems like proof that something’s wrong […]. I force myself to breathe. Everyone who does this is scared, I think. Everyone who has ever done this has been scared” (118). The levels of danger only heighten when, later, she is asked to plant a listening device at the Balfour hotel and then to participate in an aristocrat’s assassination attempt with Damian, prompting her to start preparing money and necessities for her eventual escape.

Rather than being consumed by this alternate life, however, Berry shows how Tessa is able to keep a grip throughout the escalating dangers she faces: her son, or more specifically, her role as a mother to him. Though only an infant, Finn’s role in the narrative is central and showcased by his sheer textual presence: More than half of the 45 chapters in the book mention or show Finn interacting with Tessa within the first page. But while Finn is not an active character, he allows Tessa to fully disengage from the IRA. As she remarks when she is watching Finn and Poppy during their playdate, she is “surprised at how easy it is to act like a normal person, like someone who doesn’t have two thousand pounds in cash hidden in her bathroom cabinet” because, in the end, the underlying fear provoked by her attachment to the IRA pales in comparison to the love she bears for her son (131). In fact, during the time when Tessa was only relegating information to Eamonn, the danger she runs by leaking information to MI5 is trivialized both by how mundane the activity has become and how insignificant it is to the time she spends with Finn or for his needs: “I meet with him [Eamonn] on the beach for about five minutes, two or three times a week, ten or fifteen minutes total. It’s nothing. I spend more time every week folding baby clothes” (146). Perhaps more than anything, normalizing the danger and grading it as a lesser priority than the everyday needs of her child make Tessa more resilient. Though there are moments where fear grips her, her involvement with the IRA does not incapacitate her: “My position in relation to the IRA has shifted. I’m studying them now, working against them, not waiting to become one of their victims” (147). And even when that control is lost and she is kidnapped for an interview with Seamus, what allows her to remain strong is her duty to her son: “Even if they shoot me, that can’t be the end. I’ll have to find a way to reach him. I’m his mam” (239). Despite being caught up in civil warfare, therefore, Berry showcases how it is seldom grand ambitions that motivate individuals; rather, it is the appeal of a return to normalcy and one’s loved ones that supports their efforts.

Family Integrity in a Divided Political Landscape

Part of what makes Northern Spy such a gripping narrative is the impossible questions it asks through its family relationships: How far would a person go for a family member? What is the limit of one’s forgiveness? And in times of strife, is a chosen family somehow inferior to one tied by blood? Given Northern Ireland’s history of political division, colonial oppression, and conflict, it is unsurprising that the integrity of any family might be challenged. But just as the ties and shared histories that define a people can be complicated, the same can be said of families. Throughout her narrative, Berry uses the complicated history of Northern Ireland to demonstrate how families can find ways to unite and persevere in times of division.

In the Northern Ireland Berry depicts, the Good Friday Agreement was something of a false flag of success 20 years later: The IRA and loyalist groups are still active and cohesive; bombing, kidnapping, and assassinations occur frequently; political discourse over the state of Northern Ireland vis-à-vis the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland remains lively and contentious; and an innate suspicion between fellow citizens is still a matter of course. On a daily basis, however, there is a general underlying anxiety to living in Northern Ireland, as Tessa explains, “The government evaluates terrorist organizations based on capacity, timescale, and intent. At the moment, we should be worried about the IRA on all three counts” (6). Yet even in spite of this general distrust and fear, Tessa and her mother aren’t able to conceive of Marian as a possible IRA member; for the entirety of Part 1, after all, they find all manner of ways to explain away the growing evidence against her. When her participation and use of Finn as a cover for an operation come to light, Tessa and her mother have very different reactions: For most of the narrative, Tessa finds her sister unforgiveable, while her mother forgives her almost immediately after the shock has passed.

Forgiveness seems to come easily for Tessa’s mother, as Berry roots her reaction within her faith when Tessa is made to remark that “it’s easier for [her mother] to forgive Marian than it is for me. She has been prepared for this all her life, her whole religion [Catholicism] is based on sin and atonement, expiation, remorse” (143). Berry’s choice of using Catholicism as a means by which Marian’s participation in the IRA can find absolution implies a complicated wrinkle in citizen-IRA relationships. As explained in the socio-historical section of this guide, the Catholic faith was also one of the main rallying factors for nationalists and, more broadly, the IRA itself. In other words, that which has motivated the IRA and its violence into action also, according to Tessa’s mother, provides its salvation. And despite Marian’s lies, manipulative behavior, and acts of terrorism, it is expected that a devout Catholic like her mother would forgive her in this context. As an agnostic, however, Tessa struggles with this expectation. Unlike her mother, her forgiveness is not innately given when her sister admits to being an informer. Loyalty to and love for her sister are heavily tested when she is confronted with the truth, since Marian has placed Finn in such close proximity to danger. Yet Berry shows that sisterhood can survive even in the most arduous of circumstances by forcing Tessa to walk in her sister’s shoes and play the informer, to face equal amounts of danger, and to confront the idea that the political landscape in Northern Ireland remains a contested issue of demographic dissatisfaction. According to Berry, love of family transcends the hardships, as even with all the danger, struggles, and brushes with death, Tessa “may be furious with her, but [she] still want[s] [Marian] to love [her] best” (189). Though Tessa does not inhabit her mother’s religiously-fueled forgiveness, she does exhibit the same logic that many family members of IRA agents have had to contend with when pardons were issued for prisoners after the Good Friday Agreement: Does a person’s violent past erase and outweigh the love shared in a family? For Berry, the answer is a resounding no. Marian does not deny the violence of her actions or their cost. Rather, because Marian holds herself accountable to the consequences of her actions, the author is able to suggest that a family might retain its integrity in a divided country when history—personal or national—is not denied but embraced and used to address the issues that brought about the conflict in the first place.

The Collateral Cost of the Greater Good

Berry uses Tessa’s integration into the IRA as a way to question the morality of the institutions that war with one another in Northern Ireland. The concept of the greater good is often used to justify the actions of every party involved in the ongoing conflict, be it the British government through MI5 or the IRA. What the ‘greater good’ entails for either party, however, has vastly opposing definitions. For the former, ending the conflict by eliminating the IRA, optimizing the safety of the country, and minimizing the burden of civilian casualties is understood to be what is best for the United Kingdom and its citizens. Their means to achieve such a goal are espionage and subversion. Yet despite their mandate, Berry depicts how such tactics often weigh lives differently in high-stakes situations and depend largely on a person’s contribution to their cause. Tessa specifically realizes this caveat in her agreement with Eamonn after the security service did not come to her and Marian’s aide when Seamus brought them in for their fatal interview:

The security service had decided to let us die, for the greater good. I’d never once considered that as one of the ways they might use us. The last time on the beach, when we celebrated, Eamonn had nearly kissed me. I’d been so stupid, I hadn’t realized that was an operational strategy (258).

This passage underlines how dehumanizing working as an informant was for Tessa; in the eyes of MI5, she was simply a peon to be used to safeguard another informant considered to be much more important, Cillian Burke. Her experience highlights how MI5 is dubiously moral in its decision-making, as their agent Eamonn manipulates an innocent bystander, coerces her to place herself in danger for Marian’s sake, lies about his offered protection, and leaves them to die. The greater good, in the eyes of MI5, therefore, isn’t dispersed equally to everyone and will only be known to a select majority of people.

Berry equally nuances the IRA in her narrative. IRA members are often depicted as the source of all violence, death, and misery in the Northern Ireland conflict and have a nearly monstrous connotation when they appear in their black ski masks. The author makes a point of depicting how gruesome and horrifying the acts of IRA members can be against their targets, such as the bombing of Elgin Street that both Tessa and Marian witnessed. It is, after all, important to remember the consequences of their actions. But the IRA, as Berry informs her reader, doesn’t engage in aimless violence. While MI5’s notion of the greater good extends to the entirety of the UK, the IRA does also have a similar cause, one that is entirely dictated by the history of colonial oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland. Seamus and the other members perceive Northern Ireland as one of the remaining colonies under British rule—a belief that he entrusted to Marian when “he gave her books about England’s other colonies, and what the empire did in Cyprus, Kenya, India, all the reasons the British flag is called the butcher’s apron” (97). Though the Good Friday Agreement made headway on reconciling the difficult and oppressive history of the land, Berry’s narrative suggests that the Agreement did not heal Northern Ireland nor fix the skewed socio-economic divisions between Catholics and Protestants. Tessa, Marian, and their mother, after all, lived in what DI Fenton called “a fairly deprived area” but were held together by a tight-knit Catholic community that only depended on each other (25). Freedom from this unbalanced social dynamic is the aim of the IRA, a goal they believe will give back power and control to people who have been deprived of it for too long. Though Tessa is of the firm belief that this result can be achieved democratically, her time as an informer troubles her preconceived notions of the IRA. As she comes to realize in this passage, their civil warfare for freedom and the deaths that occur from it are not unlike other military powers in other wars:

Watching them, they seem no different from a unit in the Special Forces or the Royal Irish Rangers, and the decision to join them no more dramatic than the decision to enlist in any army. I try to locate the moral difference between them and, say, the Royal Air Force. The RAF has maimed and killed civilians, too. It all seems so vacant (181).

Inevitably, therefore, as both entities work toward their idea of the greater good, Berry suggests that both engender a collateral cost to the population that is equally as morally dubious as the other.