Still fiddling...

I keep posting these synopses because by doing so, I'm reading them afresh and getting a better sense of how well they're doing. Or not doing. And I'm almost thinking this version doesn't really get the essence of the story and I should start over, from scratch...

Derry, April 1981

Bobby Sands’ hunger strike has been underway for a month and Northern Ireland is caught in nonstop demonstrations, protests...and death at the hands of the IRA, UDA, Constables and British soldiers. The last thing in the world Brendan wants to do is return there. But he is told his mother is dying and wants to see him, so he feels duty-bound to go.

Using the passport of his friend, Jeremy Landau, he enters into the country as an American Jew doing research for a thesis on methods of crowd control, which everyone appears to accept. After all, it’s been eight years since he was spirited away, and many think Brendan Kinsella is long dead. But the British being the British, since there was no body or funeral they're still thinking they want to question him about that bombing.

Of course, once he arrives Brendan finds out his mother never sought his return. In fact, she remains coldly antagonistic to him...while she's lucid. But Percocet messes with her grasp on reality and sometimes she even fails to recognize him as her son, while other times rambles tenderly about the past, as if he's not there. Obviously, the end is drawing near.

Brendan figures he was tricked into coming home because his younger sister, Maeve, needs the help. She is stretched to her limit, caring for Ma, and at the same time she is working for peace, with Father Jack. 

Their older sister, Mairead, is pregnant with twins so is of no use; their Aunt Mari is having issues with her own family; younger brother, Rhuari, assists as he can, but is more focused on keeping himself and his wife as far away from the back and forth with the Constables and Army as possible; while the youngest, Kieran, is in gleeful confrontation with them.

But worse that all of that? His older brother, Eamonn, who’s been in prison for years, is being pushed by Kieran and Ma to add his name to the list of hunger strikers. Something Brendan cannot abide.

He pitches in to help Maeve, planning to keep as low a profile as possible until his mother is gone, even as her ramblings raise troubling questions about his father’s past and why he was murdered. They also reveal unknown aspects of his life that shake Brendan’s long-held disdain for him. He starts to dig deeper into the man’s life, but then Father Jack lets slip that Joanna might not have been killed, sending Brendan careening into turmoil.

For eight years he’d thought her dead and himself partly to blame, and no one had said a word to him, otherwise. He tries to find a way to verify it without revealing himself, but before he can do so Bobby Sands dies and Derry explodes into more death and destruction.

Now Brendan is trapped. The British Army knows he's not Jeremy and are closing in to arrest him. And it looks more and more like there is no safe place for him.

Does this make you want to read the story?