Publisher's Synopsis
This book is about the Good Friday Agreement and indeed the very nature of what an agreement is and how it is arrived at or hammered out. It is a blend of fact and fiction and could be deemed as experimental writing or faction. The Sunningdale Agreement and The Good Friday Agreement are also analysed. The narrator of the book, Patrick Sweeney, was born on the same day as the Good Friday Agreement and like Saleem in Rushdie's Midnight's Children, he feels he is handcuffed to history and that his destiny is bound up with that of his province. The Good Friday Agreement was premised on the auxiliary verb 'may', and to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty, the negotiators owed it a fortune. An auxiliary verb is a verb used in forming the tenses, moods and voices of other verbs. The primary auxiliary verbs in English are be, do and have, and the modal auxiliaries are can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would. So to get rid of the artillery they had to use auxiliaries! After Strand One had been hammered out, the thorn in the side of the Nationalists became the thorn in the crown of the Unionists, so in went the modal auxiliary cavalry.
