Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what they have in common (Faustian bargains, for a start) may come as a surprise.

Claire Kilroy’s fifth novel, Soldier Sailor (2023) has made a huge impression on its readers. I’m not one of them yet, though I certainly intend to read it before too long. Another book of hers that I haven’t yet read is her first, All Summer (2003) — though again I’ll emphasize the “yet”. I have read the three novels in between, Tenderwire (2006), All Names Have Been Changed (2009) and The Devil I Know (2012), and my first impression of them was that they’re a very varied body of work. Tenderwire has been described as a thriller: it’s exciting and eventful with plenty of plot, and largely set in New York, with an interval in Vienna for a high-profile concert performance. The other two books are both set in an economically depressed Ireland, one in the mid 1980s, the other in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. On the face of it, even these two books have little in common. All Names Have Been Changed is the naturalistic account of a creative writing workshop held in Trinity College Dublin, while The Devil I Know is a savage satire on the greed and wilful stupidity of property developers and their hangers-on, most of whom are presented as caricatures.

I wasn’t expecting to find a common thread linking three such conspicuously different novels. However, rereading them in succession over the past ten days or so, I was surprised to discover how obvious the common thread is. It could be argued that each of them is centrally concerned with a version of the Faustian bargain. At any rate, a devil — a satanic character — has an important role to play in each of the three.

Tenderwire is the first-person narrative of Eva Tyne, a 24-year-old concert violinist from a relatively well off background in Baily, Howth, north of Dublin. In New York, Eva suffers severe pain in her gut just before a concert where she is soloist. She plays the concert and is immediately taken to hospital. After being discharged, she goes on a drinking binge in the course of which she meets a man named Alexander who says he is Chechen. Alexander offers to sell her “a Stradivarius”, which he claims to have smuggled out of Russia. He takes her to a derelict tenement, a tenebrous cave, to show her the instrument.

Having played the violin for a short time in this confined space while drunk and with a bad bow, and though it does not come with any provenance, Eva is certain that she must have the supposed Strad. She negotiates Alexander’s demanded price down to $600,000. She has a little more than half of that amount from her father’s estate, and can sell her own violin for $150,000 to $160,000, but that still leaves her short. Without documentation, she has no hope of borrowing the shortfall from any kind of reputable lender.

Eva does manage to raise all the money but she can’t resist trying to cheat Alexander, leaving him $70,000 short of the agreed price. He doesn’t count the money at the handover, which takes place out in the open, presumably believing that Eva is too smart to imagine that she could get away with swindling him, and that in any case she will be easy to find.

And indeed he finds her without difficulty. Alexander turns up at an after-concert party, looking menacing:

A man in a black suit was striding across the room, so tall that his head was visible above the crowd. He cut through it like a shark fin through water and pulled up in front of us. (p. 227)

Once Alexander has delivered his ultimatum and gone away again, Zach, the conductor of the concert orchestra that Eva has been playing with, puts her right on one point:

“Eva, that man isn’t Chechen. Or Russian.”

I stared at Zach, my heart pounding as if he’d unmasked Alexander as the devil himself. (p. 228)

Eva has other problems but that with Alexander turns out to be far and away the least tractable. Of course, the violin isn’t a Strad. But it was made in early eighteenth-century Cremona: it’s identified as a Guarneri (del Gesù).

Eva is being sued by the elderly daughter of a Jewish man who owned a Guarneri which was stolen by the Nazis. He died in Treblinka. His daughter eventually has to drop the case because of the lack of evidence as to the violin’s identity, but it seems very likely that it’s the same instrument. There are probably not very many “lost” Guarneri violins knocking around Eastern Europe. So, Eva is in the unconscionable position of insisting on a right to ownership based on possession that can be traced back to a Nazi crime. That doesn’t seem to bother her as much as it should.

If it is the same violin, it has a long provenance, going back to the eighteenth century. It may have been owned by Paganini who had been reputed to have entered into a deal with the devil. His contemporaries believed that that was the only way to explain his extraordinary virtuosity.

Eva (who has previously been known as Aoife and Evelyn) is the daughter of an apparently successful businessman — a picture exists of the Taoiseach abord his yacht — who disappeared in the mid 90s and is presumed to have killed himself. Eva would like to believe that he is still alive, having faked his death, although there’s been no trace of financial activity on his part since his disappearance.

But Ireland was rife with corruption at the time, businessmen behaving as if they were above the law — my father could’ve had an offshore account in a false name. Everyone else did on the hill. The man could’ve been siphoning money off for years beforehand. If he was anywhere near as crooked as his only child, it would have been no bother to him. Lying, cheating, dissembling, just to get what you want. I didn’t lick it off the stones. (p. 189)

The Dublin from which Eva’s father had disappeared had more than its fair share of “grisly enclaves after more than a decade of recession and the heroin plague” (pp. 187–8). The next novel, All Names Have Been Changed, is set much earlier in that grim period, in 1985. Its narrator is Declan, an engineering graduate from UCD. Having spent a number of years working in Leeds, Declan has come back to Dublin to enrol in a creative writing workshop in Trinity, led by his literary idol, P J Glynn.

Glynn has published eight successful novels but after a vicious dispute with his longstanding editor, who died not long afterwards, he is expected to have difficulty finding a publisher for his future work, assuming he manages to produce any. The workshop starts off with eight students but three of them soon drop out, leaving just Declan and four young women. The students, including Declan, all hero-worship Glynn, apart from Antonia, at 39 the oldest of the group, who sends him poison pen letters, telling him he will pay. As Declan puts it:

Not everyone saw past his faults, as we saw. We saw so far past his faults that we barely saw him at all. (p. 130)

The students’ favourite among Glynn’s novels is The Devil’s Party, “loosely based on Blake’s life” (p. 106). (The title comes from Blake’s famous assertion that Milton was “a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I can’t resist adding that the suggestion that Milton, of all writers, didn’t know what side he was on has long struck me as peculiarly wrongheaded.)

The devil motif recurs throughout the novel, for example:

Was that the night Aisling told me her [i.e. Faye’s] husband beat her? You know her husband beats her, don’t you? It must have been that night. I can’t tell them apart any more, especially those long diabolical ones. (p. 154)

Glynn is clearly on the skids. He has always been a heavy drinker, but he may be getting worse, or at least less well able to handle it. Gradually, Declan begins to associate the writer with demons.

Glynn stood winded in our circle, half the man we knew him to be. He had exorcised his demon, cast out his succubus, with the terrifying complication that we had seen it. Something three-dimensional had shot from his fingers and fallen into the shrubbery. We had heard it land. (p. 198)

The thing that Glynn threw into the shrubbery turns out to be — “a small curled trilobyte” (p. 200) — his hearing aid.

After Glynn has slept with Guinevere, the fellow-student with whom Declan is infatuated, he seems to Declan to be surrounded by demons.

He threw the workshop door open, and Aisling gasped, but I had seen it too this time, the demon that had been hanging like a bat behind the door all along. A blink of an eye and it was gone. (p. 242)

Soon, there are many more demons, and Declan isn’t the only person who sees them:

They had stolen up without us noticing and had him rightly surrounded. No matter which way he turned, a leering head popped up, provoking one wincing grimace after another from the writer … “Hideous, hideous,” he declared, yet he couldn’t tear his eyes from their disfigured faces either, now that they had finally revealed their foul selves to him. They’d been hiding behind books and doors for years, lurking at the bottom of pint glasses and whiskey bottles, but now his demons were sitting right there at the table with us, bold as brass, defiant as you like. (p. 249)

In case there’d be any doubt that the “demons” (two out of three, at any rate) are diabolical in nature, Glynn names them, “Moloch, Ezekiel, Belial” (p. 250). So, there seems little room for doubt that the Faustian character in this story, the one who has signed away his soul in an infernal bargain, is Glynn himself. Yet, at the novel’s end, Glynn appears sad and remorseful but not in any sense damned. His ninth novel, Electra Is Complex comes out two years after Declan’s last encounter with him. It’s the story of his involvement with Guinevere.

“His doomed affair and subsequent redemption. Glynn was a new man in his author’s photograph. No longer meat-faced, liver-lipped, clown-haired, glowering. (p. 268)

If “redemption” is to be taken at face value — a big if, I’ll admit — this suggests that Declan has changed places with him, taken over his obligations under the contract. It’s clear, at least, that novel charts Declan’s progress from being a bad writer to being a better one. Until quite late in the book, Kilroy bravely gives him some infelicitous turns of phrase, risking the possibility that she herself might take the blame for them. For example:

Were I a real writer, I would narrate a scene describing Antonia’s solitary journey home to the leafy suburbs of south County Dublin at night. Our influence would wear off as the train stations shunted past, and she would become less glossy, more subdued. (p. 161)

Such a scene, if he had written it, would ideally not have included the phrase “leafy suburbs”.

If I’m right in thinking that Glynn and Declan exhange roles, the switchover probably occurs when Glynn calculatedly (if drunkenly) provokes the younger man into savagely beating and kicking him.

He laughed. “To think I thought she’d be one of those girls who look better with their clothes on than off.” (p. 252)

Declan’s taking Glynn’s place as the writer maudit possibly accounts for the unexpectedly (and if I’m right deceptively) upbeat ending. At the final meeting of the group, without Glynn, Declan declares that he is going to leave the country:

“Yes,” I said. “There’s nothing for us in this country. It’s never going to change. It’s never going to get better. The sow that eats her farrow. I’m off in two weeks … There’ll never be any money, there’ll never be any jobs, there’ll never be any future. We have to get out fast if we want a chance at life. Come with me Guinevere.” (pp. 262–3)

Guinevere shows no sign of being tempted by this invitation. She tells him she only came to say goodbye to Faye. After Guinevere has left, Antonia attempts to put him straight on a few facts:

“Don’t you realise that if there ever was money in this country, no writer could afford to live here? Glynn would have starved before he even got started. Our literary tradition would perish. You better pray it doesn’t change. (p. 263)

Notwithstanding her unencouraging reaction to Declan’s request, and against his expectations, Guinevere turns up at the appointed time and place. The novel ends:

I stooped and gathered Guinevere up, lifted her off the ground and buried my face in her hair. Thank you she says I chanted into her neck, and I take her word for it, I take her word. Around and around we went, revolving slowly, her feet dangling in the air. “Are you ready?” I asked when I was able.

She nodded. “I’m ready.”

She accepted my hand and set her calm face to the street, as if joining me in a dance. Through the gates, onto Dame Street, uphill to Swift’s cathedral. I will call this moment the beginning. (pp. 269–70)

This passage echoes a longer one about halfway through the book, when Guinevere and Declan begin their brief relationship. He picks her up and twirls her around.

She laughed, her coiled hair streaming out behind her, and I realised I could not be happier … Though I’d walked that street a thousand times without her, our first walk together would eclipse all previous walks. I knew that even as the journey was unfolding, Dame Street would never be detached from my memory of walking it, practically running it, hand in hand with Guinevere. She was taking me to her room. (pp. 136–7)

Though I noticed the echoes, it took me quite a while to understand that he was rewriting the earlier passage. Of course, he’s rewritten it better: there’s no longer any “hair streaming out behind her”, no “eclipse” of all previous walks, no “even as the journey was unfolding”. He’s a “real” writer now. A writer, obviously, of fiction.

Towards the end of the novel, Declan writes in a paragraph by itself at the end of a section:

There is so much that I have left out. (p. 264)

I could say much the same about what I’ve written above.

Having spent rather longer on the middle book than I intended, I’ll try to deal with The Devil I Know briefly. It’s a more explicitly and obviously Faustian tale than the other two. I’ve already described it above as a savage satire; the uncontrolled explosion of property development which led up to the 2008 economic catastrophe is presented as the work of none other than the devil. The builders, bankers, financiers and businesspeople who borrowed GDP-eclipsing amounts for no better reason than the money was on offer, were (sometimes knowingly, often not) in league with infernal forces. It’s a furiously angry book, which makes the author’s control over the narrative, and over the grim humour, all the more impressive.

Many of the most bizarre, outlandish elements in the story are surprisingly close to reality, most notably the isolated farm in County Meath that the developers buy at an enormously inflated price, intending to turn it into a new urban zone. To this end, they bribe “the Minister” to divert the route of Metro North to service the fantasy “Zone”. The corrupt minister is Ray Lawless, a name that recalls two real-life Fianna Fáil politicians, Ray Burke (who served in various ministerial positions) and Liam Lawlor (who was never a minister but was effectively in charge of planning corruption in Dublin for many years). The real-life Metro North was put on hold following the crash and, almost 20 years later, still hasn’t been built.

The Earl of Howth was a real title: it was extinguished in the early twentieth century when the fourth earl died without an heir, so Tristram, as “thirteenth” earl, may be said to exist in an anternative reality. Notwithstanding the aristocratic title, this Tristram stands for the populace at large: he’s complicit in the shenanigans, but not directly responsible for them. He can see, more or less, what’s going on; he signs some of the paperwork without asking any questions. He thinks it has nothing to do with him, and that he can just get on with his everyday life on the periphery of the corruption. His relative innocence is not enough to save him. The novel attempts to show what happens when debts are run up that could never possibly be paid, yet somehow must be paid.

Apart from the Faustian theme, another element that these three novels have in common is the abandonment, neglect or mistreatment of animals. Fleeing from Alexander’s threats, Tenderwire’s Eva flies back to Dublin in a hurry. Her cat, Ming-Ming, suffers as a result:

Ming can’t understand why I don’t seem to care about her anymore. Wasn’t she brave and loyal? Didn’t she love me so fiercely that her small heart nearly burst? When had she ever given less than her best? And yet I leave her behind in this loveless place day after day. The unfortunate creature has to endure the quarantine for a full six months because I forgot to pack her vaccination cert.

What possessed me to inflict this on her? … I won’t get the same cat back. She looks old, all of a sudden. (p. 249)

In All Names Have Been Changed the victims are also cats. Some children torture a cat on bonfire night by setting off a firework in its backside. When that turns out to lack entertainment value, they throw it, still alive, on the bonfire. Declan makes a half-hearted attempt to rescue the cat and gets beaten up by a vigilante who thinks he’s a “fucken perv” who has been “spying on the kiddies” (pp. 64–5). There’s also a feral cat, Sylvia (named by the women in the writing workshop after their favourite author), in the grounds of Trinity who gets part of her face torn off.

When Tristram St Lawrence goes back to take a look at his mother’s old home on Howth hill, which has been abandoned and falling into dereliction for more than a decade, he finds a lonely, decrepit pony in the grounds. He remembers the pony from when he was a teenager and girls in jodhpurs used to come to ride the animal. The emaciated, half-starved pony is pathetically pleased to see Tristram, who offers him an apple which he can’t chew because his teeth have rotted away.

Editions: Tenderwire, Faber paperback, 2007; All Names Have Been Changed, Faber trade paperback, 2009; The Devil I Know, Faber uncorrected page proof, 2012; all ellipses added, emphasis original.