Dublin, some years from now, and the President of the United States has
just been assassinated during a state dinner in his honour. The official
account has already taken hold but a hawk-eyed octogenarian named Monk,
believing that there's nothing that cannot be known, has a version of
his own -- a dark and twisted tale of both the watcher and the
watched.Nothing gets past a man as invisible as me, he says, introducing
us to a cast of damaged characters he has kept under the strictest
surveillance for years. Chief among them is Schroeder, recently sacked
from Trinity College, where he once taught the Presidential daughter,
and is now wandering the city streets in a medicated fugue as sinister
and violent events begin to take control of his life. But this, says
Monk, is no thriller or invented tale of suspense. It is, he insists, an
honest and faithful record of breakage and distress at a time when
dysfunction -- personal, local, national, global and even cosmic --
pervades all. A time when everything is already broken and when, in many
ways, the shooting of a pill-popping President is neither here nor
there. The only thing that matters, Monk tells us, is the truth.And this
is why, stationed high in his attic room with a Stoli in a highball, he
does what he does. There's divinity in it, he says. And a modicum of
love.
