Review of Gerard Cappa's BLOOD FROM A SHADOW: a scathing indictment of motherhood and apple pie

Blood From A Shadow is an action-packed
political thriller from Belfast writer Gerard Cappa, told in the first person. The hero, Con Maknazpy (who, in
the beginning, thinks he is the son of an Irish-American Pole), is a veteran of the Iraq
war suffering from PTSD whose family life back in New York is going to pieces.
Although he knows he should spend his time reconciling himself with the disillusioned wife and
son, who have borne the brunt of his erratic behavior since he left the service, the simple Irish-American value system which he holds dear, the
devotion to his childhood friends, and his unquestioning belief in his
country, right or wrong, all make him easy fodder to be tricked into a
Kafkaesque situation (think: the Castle) in which, like a piece of useful meat, he is fed blindly through an evil sausage making machine that involves halts for ever more poisonous ingredients in Belfast, Rome, Istanbul and back in New York.




As the novel begins, he thinks the duty he is inveigled into performing, by a person he trusts in New York, is to inform the mother of a childhood friend of the friend’s death, but every few pages the task and the environment change. Until quite close to the end of the novel, as he is led from being the unwitting killer from one violent situation into yet another, he doesn’t know what the hell is going
on.




As an upstanding Irish-American, for whom the ould sod is paradise, there
are a couple of hilarious scenes at the beginning of the book after he stumbles
into a loyalist pub in Belfast and shows the IRA tattoo on his arm. Later in the novel, Con shows himself to be more at home among the Yazidis and gypsies of Istanbul than in the
segregated capital of Northern Ireland.




Throughout the book, a Rambo-like Con continues
to flounder for meaning as he fights to uphold his values by making the corpses around him pile higher. His philosophy is a
simple one. “Shit happens” and when shit happens, you have to act or react.
Every institution, or representative of one, with which he comes in contact, uses and betrays him; the Catholic Church, the CIA and other shadowy American intelligence organizations,
his PTSD counselor, the Israeli and Brit plotters who wish to bring down a
second 9/11 on the United States, hazy groups of drug runners.

Wherever the true red-white-and blue Con can be manipulated
into killing one of their private targets, one of these groups or organizations
will make a tool of him.




The only institution that gives Con any sort
of respite from violence or help is, ironically, the Anglican Church in Istanbul

The end
of the book reveals the awful secret, by American standards, that the root of
all evil lies in the hoary myth of motherhood and apple pie. For their own
ends, Irish-American mothers will favor one child over another, while conditioning them both for Uncle Sam or faction fighting. At the same time as their mother’s milk makes their boy children simple, honest men who respond gratefully to calls to arms, it also blinds them to the truth of how they will be exploited for partisan ends. The
men like Con who volunteer, believe in the nobility of their cause, but ultimately find the
real reason they are sent to places like Afghanistan and Iraq (and previously
Vietnam) is vilely to butcher many more innocent women and children than enemies bearing
arms, and then live with the consequences of their war crimes.




Once these
traumatized men leave the service, they are left on their own to struggle with their physical and psychological handicaps. Anybody who has read this far will understand that I have a beef about the way American veterans have been treated after serving their country. Nearly every institution that promises to help them lets them
down or even, as in Con’s case, willingly throws them back into harm’s way.



On one level, Blood from a Shadow, can be read
as a page-turner, and on that level it works perfectly. I can recommend it highly to anyone who wants thrills from beginning to end and value for their money. The reader will lose count
of the bodies Con leaves in his wake, not only the guilty but also the innocent
men and women in the netherworld of Istanbul whom he blithely recruits to help
him, paying no attention to the price they will have to pay, until it is too late to save them from him.




But Cappa does not present Con solely as a mindless Rambo figure. Although limited by the cultural boundaries of his upbringing, Con is an observer who becomes keenly aware of the individuals, men, women and children he sees in Iraq and Turkey and realizes that the people who have been misrepresented to him as primitive and violent are, in many ways, equal or superior to the ones he comes from, which have been waging terrible warfare and attempted genocide on the rest of the world since the beginning of the modern era. 




So, on another level, this book can be read as a scathing indictment of what Northern Irish bigotry, American redneck patriotism, the billions of Western dollars invested in weapons and men of mass destruction, what Eisenhower described as the "military-industrial complex", and the wish to transform the rest of the world into fawning clones of Western democracy can do
to their own trusting children: make monsters of them. In this novel, Con begins to doubt the ideology that formed him: he cannot ignore the finer points of the people and cultures he has been trained to destroy. That is what makes Blood from a Shadow even more than an action thriller. Con kills in the name of all he believes true, until the point where most of what he believes true is revealed to him as false. Stuart Neville’s Ghosts of Belfast comes to mind, in the way
it delineated how the people who did the actual killing during the troubles are
haunted by their ghosts while many of the cute bastards who manoeuvred them into it are now swanning around the Northern Irish Parliament, with all expenses paid.




A few reviewers on Amazon have drawn attention
to the parallels between Cappa’s novel and Irish mythology, so I won’t go further into
those aspects of the novel. Below are a few parallels of my own that came to mind as, I was reading it.



I am a country music fan, so the first parallel was listening to
Toby Keith, in a crowded hall in Tennessee, singing The Red White and Blue and An American Soldier,  both of which you can listen to on Youtube (be patient for the first minute, as the ad works its way out of the frame). Keith could be singing about Con or his friend, Ferdia.




A second parallel, is one of the verses from Tom Paxton's song, "When Princes Meet", which describes how, once a poor little man like Con has already served, he "must do more". There are many powerful descriptions in the novel of how all the great lords he thought he could trust betrayed him:

"When kings make war, the poor little men must fight them./They must do more,
They hold out their necks for great lord's swords to bite them./The sons of the lords cleave through their ranks,
In the hopes some warrior king might knight them./It's what the poor little men are for, when kings make war."

A third parallel came to me during the novel's descriptions of the atrocities committed by Ferdia and/or Con in Iraq, a quote from the Duke of Wellington. The Wellington I'm thinking of is the one who is said to have said before the Battle of Waterloo, "I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me."




Cappa's novel shows that, although we in the West are proud of our recent technological progress and "civilizing influence", in truth we are still the same Norman warlords, Teutonic knights and Frankish crusaders who colonized the non-Christian parts of Europe in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries by putting to the sword any peoples, especially the Scandinavians, who did not blindly accept our diktat of the one true faith. We're continuing to frighten the hell out of nearly every civilization we've come in contact with over the past five hundred years. The one thing that may save us is the realization by the Con Maknazpy's of this world that they can shuck off the indoctrination that began in the cradle and open up to the gentler influences of other traditions, cultures,  philosophies and belief systems.



You can buy Blood from a Shadow from Amazon