Writing and Society Research Centre

‘The Thriller and Transitional Justice: David Park’s The Truth Commissioner’

Abstact: What is the role of literature in the aftermath of political conflict? How do literary texts inform the process of political transformation and social reconciliation? Can fiction provide a form of truth that is unavailable in other modes of discourse such as politics and history? This paper will address these questions by examining David Park’s novel The Truth Commissioner (2008). The paper represents the opening salvo in a project to map out Irish literary history in the wake of the Troubles. In The Truth Commissioner David Park’ depicts a fictional Truth and Reconciliation Commission, based on the South African model, set up to provide transitional justice in the aftermath of the Northern Ireland conflict. The book deploys the formal tropes of the thriller to question the grandiose claims of such commissions and the popular perception that they enable post-traumatic recovery, social reconciliation and historical closure for nations emerging from civil conflict.

Bio: Matt McGuire was born in Belfast and gained his MA, MSc and PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Before coming to UWS he was a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on various aspects of Irish and Scottish Literature, contemporary fiction and crime writing. He is the author of Dark Dawn (2012), a crime novel set in post-conflict Northern Ireland. The sequel to this novel, When Sorrows Come, will be published by Constable Robinson in 2014.

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