Shiners’ War by Conor Ryan
2018, W J Ryan and Conor Ryan, 60 pages
This is a graphic novel about the Irish diaspora moving into the Ottawa area. The main character is Michael, an Irish labourer who starts off working on the Rideau Canal, where he gets sick, and his family dies, save for a cousin who’s also working the canal. After the Canal work finishes, he and his cousin fall in with the Shiners, an Irish gang of hooligans, and engage in some light piracy and racketeering. Michael struggles to get out and live the good life of a hard-working, ideal immigrant.
I liked the simplicity of the storyline and the illustrator’s style. With only sixty pages, it’s hard to weave a complex narrative, especially with the limited text and more visual storytelling style of sequential art. Not everyone needs to be Hamlet, and not everyone is. This story illustrates the situation of working-class Irish in a frontier town. Whiskey and hookers are more situationally appropriate than philosophers in a salon.
While I liked the simplicity of the story and the almost Caravaggio-esque shadowy illustrations that accompanied it, I would have preferred if it were more than sixty pages, and developed the characters a little more. Laura the love interest, Michael the working-class damned, Cousin Tommy who wants to be a gangster, could have all been better fleshed out with more time.
I really enjoyed this graphic novel. It worked as a story, rather than simply trying to shoe-horn a narrative into a history lesson. It doesn’t bog down the plot with names and dates, and succeeds in evoking pathos for the characters. It’s not a long read, and I’d recommend it as a good introduction to the time period.
★★★★☆
