Better The Evil You Know

I finished Patrick McGinley’s BOGMAIL during the week, and a very fine read it is too. Republished by New Island Books as a ‘Modern Irish Classic’, it is neither a ‘whodunit’ nor a ‘whydunit’ – we know from very early on who killed the barman Eamonn Eales, and why. But BOGMAIL’S pleasures lie elsewhere, not least in its beautiful descriptions of its rural Donegal village setting and mountainous hinterland, the whimsical humour and linguistic gymnastics that echo Flann O’Brien, and the occasional foray into philosophical conundrum.
  At one point McGinley touches on something intrinsic to the crime / mystery novel, which is the existence of evil. I’m not noticeably religious myself, and I don’t believe that Evil exists as a force of nature in the same way as, say, gravity does – although there’s no doubt that there are people and acts that can be described as evil. Anyway, McGinley offers this, during a conversation between his main characters, Roarty and Potter:

  ‘It’s good to be confronted with evil if only because it reminds you of the residue of good within you.’
  ‘Why call it “evil”? Why not “disorder”? Use the word “evil” and you are swamped in theology.” (pg 213)

  Is evil a necessary by-product of theology? An old-fashioned superstition? Or is it out there somewhere, a physical force lurking in the unseen and unknowable dark matter of the universe?
  Answers on a used twenty to the usual address.