The April Dead - Alan Parks

 I remember coming across the first of Alan Parks' Harry McCoy series four or five years ago.   Bloody January and February's Son are reviewed on this blog.   I somehow missed the third, Bobby March Will Live Forever (great title) and here we are with number four, The April Dead.   Still back in 1974 Glasgow, McCoy is called to a tenement flat where a young man has blown himself up making a bomb.   This of course is the heyday of the Troubles in Ulster, mainland IRA outrages, the Angry Brigade and all that.   But what got this kid so fired up?

Then Harry is approached by an American, Andrew Stewart, whose son Donny has gone missing from the naval base at Greenock.   Harry agrees to look into it, but first he has to collect his old pal from the in-care days, Stevie Cooper, about to be released from six months in prison at Aberdeen.   Stewart and Stevie take to one another.   Meanwhile forensics find someone else's blood in the bombmaker's flat, a very rare type, Donny Stewart's type.

Homemade bombs start going off everywhere - a smallish one in the cathedral, something much bigger at a local brewery.   People are dying.   Harry finds himself leading an nvestigation into rightwing nationalism, the Territorial Army, and torture techniques developed for officially-denied use in Northern Ireland.

As ever, the characters are brilliantly well-drawn and the plot keeps deepening.   I especially enjoyed the way Parks handled the involvement of the travelling fairground community.   The April Dead is every bit as good as the first two in the series.   I really must look out for March and May.

Out of this World - Graham Swift

Swift is interesting: one of those writers from circa 1980, he won the Booker fairly early and then never really rose any higher in public perception.  He was there with Amis fils, Ian McEwen, even Salman Rushdie, back in the day, but not really now.  Scribner, however, seem to have done a substantial reissue of his backlist in these smart, clean paperbacks, and I thought I'd give him a go.

Firstly, you don't really get the title until the end.  The revelation is okay, but it's not worth waiting for.  Otherwise, the story is presented through a series of monologues, mainly those of Harry Beech, a sixty-four year-old former war photographer, and his daughter Sophie, thirty-six, who is married and living in the US.  Sophie is talking to her psychotherapist, Dr Klein.  We don't really know who Harry is talking to - himself?

Harry and Sophie have never been close.  After her Greek mother Anna died in a plane crash, Sophie has been brought up by her grandfather Robert Beech, MD of Beech Munitions Company, one-armed, holder of a Victoria Cross.  Robert, of course, fought in World War I; he was the third son, never expected to take over the family business, but both his brothers died in the trenches.  His wife died giving birth to Harry in 1918.  Robert and Harry were never close.  But the book begins with father and son in a rare moment together, watching the first Moon landing on TV.

Harry served during the second war.  He got shifted into intelligence, where he developed his photography.  Post war, he documented the Nuremberg Trials, which is where he met Anna.

In 1972 everything changes.  Robert Beech and his chauffeur are killed by a terrorist car bomb.  Both Harry and Sophie witness the explosion.  It is the beginning of their estrangement.  Harry, who coincidentally was due to fly to Belfast later that day to photograph the Troubles, gives up journalism altogether.  Sophie, due to go to University, goes off to Greece where she meets and marries cheerful Joe.  Joe is in the tourist business and in 1982, when the main body of the story is set, runs a company selling Olde England to US tourists.

By 1982 Harry is a specialist in aerial photographer, for field archaeologists, mainly.  He has met a much younger woman and plans to marry her.  He finally reaches out to Sophie, inviting her to the wedding.,  Meanwhile, the ridiculous Falklands War happens - such a stunt, such an absurd final convulsion of imperialism, that Harry is reminded of the Trojan War rather than wars he covered in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East.  Does that make his half-Greek daughter Iphigenia?

It's a many-layered novel, touching on many themes, but mainly the disintegration of family.  It was written in 1988, is very much of his time, but none the worse for that.  It was interesting, well-written, and had several compelling male characters.  Sophie, however, is just a pampered bitch, therefore the story lacks balance.  That is probably its only fault.  I was entertained and impressed, always a good combination.  I will try more.

The Man Who Was Saturday - Patrick Bishop

 

The problem for a biographer of the politician Airey Neave is that it was interesting at the beginning and at the end with nothing of interest inbetween.  As a young man in World War II he escaped from Colditz and was the first British escapee to make it all the way home.  He went on to work with resisters in occupied Europe but, worthwhile and commendable as this was, he did most of it from a desk in Whitehall.  After the war he became a Tory MP, spending 30 years as an unexceptional backbencher.  In 1975 he organised Margaret Thatcher's successful bid for the Tory leadership.  She naturally offered him any job he wanted in the Shadow Cabinet and he chose, as his first and only front bench job, Shadow Irish Secretary.  This of course was towards the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Bombs on the mainland were starting and the IRA was splintering into ultra-violent factions.  One of these was the Irish National Liberation Army, which on March 30 1979 blew up Neave and his car as he was leaving the underground car park of the House of Commons.

In his lifetime Neave was known for the Colditz escape.  Now he is remembered, if at all, for his horrible death.  Those are the two events that interest Bishop in this book.  He provides good context for each and there was much that was new to me in relation to the Irish situation in the Seventies.  My main interest in seeking out the book, however, was another military disaster which Neave was witness to, and which he went on to write about - the siege of  Calais in which hundreds of allied troops were abandoned to fight to the death and so occupy the German army whilst the rest of the failed British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk.  Neave was there with a non-combatant searchlight squad (something I had not heard of).  He was wounded early on, quite seriously, and was ultimately taken prisoner.  There was enough here to satisfy me that I really need to get Neave's own book on the episode.

The problem, as I say, is the yawning 30-year gap in the middle.  Neave was happily married and kept busy with constituency work, work for an engineering company that employed him, and with a reasonably successful writing career.  But it's not enough to fire up any biographer.  When Neave accidentally finds himself wheeling and dealing over Mrs Thatcher's future, this reader can't help wishing he had failed.  I lived through Thatcher's reign of terror and I roundly hated her.  Neave, of course, didn't live to see what he had inflicted on his beloved country.  Bishop tries to mollify my kind of reader with regular disclaimers of the 'he probably wouldn't have agreed with her more controversial policies' variety.  Oh yes he would.  He put up with the senile Churchill, the useless Eden and the appalling Heath (who he actually hated).  Monetarism, deindustrialisation and mass unemployment were hardly going to worry him.

Acts of Allegiance - Peter Cunningham

I find myself conflicted over the modern Irish novel, of which this is certainly one. I hate the formulaic family-in-a-misty-soggy-paradise novel which has dominated the Booker for so long. On the other hand there are standout marvels like Roddy Doyle. Peter Cunningham, on the evidence of this novel, falls somewhere between the two.

There are heinous echoes of the formula - the roguish Pa who puts on a front, the matriarch's house which includes people who may or may not be family members. But against that we have the personal story of Marty Ransom who has bridged the border by collaborating with the Brits whilst building a career in the Irish diplomatic corps. And the compelling antagonist of Iggy Kane, Marty's cousin and childhood boon companion.

The balance between the two is not quite right. Cunningham essentially has three storylines going - childhood, young adulthood, and subsequent, ultimate  betrayal. The one that doesn't get quite enough play, for me, is the betrayal. We perhaps need just one more example of Iggy's activities in the North before he blasts his way back into Marty's life. That said, the betrayal itself is beautifully done.

The Psalm Killer - Chris Petit

It's surprising, when you think about it -that the thirty-year 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland haven't spawned their own genre. I mean, the premise has everything - ancient blood feuds, dark deeds in ordinary streets, corruption and double-dealing on a truly epic scale. Perhaps it is still too soon. Perhaps so little of the truth is out there in the public domain that building a fiction on what little we do know seems like a hostage to fortune.
None of this, clearly, deterred Chris Petit, film maker (e.g. the cult Radio On) and occasional crime novelist. Psalm Killer came out in 1996, a year before the Northern Ireland Agreement, and is set mainly a decade earlier with flashbacks to ten years before that. It therefore covers most of the period.

The protagonist is Inspector Cross of the RUC, an Englishman married into the Ulster squirearchy. Petit thus deals with the key obstacle in writing about the Troubles - which side is right and who is the good guy. Cross is an outsider, even to the RUC. His marriage is failing and he has always been a disappointment to the in-laws. He has no real opinions about the situation.  He checks under his car for bombs every morning before leaving for the office. He investigates murders.

Our antagonist, the titular Psalm Killer, is also English, an emotionally crippled soldier who volunteered to serve deep undercover in Northern Ireland. Known only by his codename Candlestick, he first infiltrates the loyalist paramilitaries, then switches to the Republicans. He disappears, ostensibly killed, only to surface again in the mid-Eighties. Unlike Cross, Candlestick does have opinions. He is apparently killing people to draw attention to his beliefs.

This brings us to Petit's central theme, which is the corruption, institutional, moral, political, that kept the Troubles going so long that by 1995 peace seemed to be in nobody's interest. Petit has done tons of research - he provides a long bibliography with useful pointers to what the main sources discuss - and he deploys his discoveries by showing rather than telling. The problem, though, is that to show so much corruption in all its multifaceted glory requires a book of considerable length. At 635 pages in paperback, The Psalm Killer is simply too long, the story so complex that by the time of the final twist - which is a good one - I could no longer remember who the surprise person was.

So, Psalm Killer has its flaws, but there is so much quality here, so much information that no one else has revealed so effectively, that it is well worth seeking out. Petit writes well. He takes the trouble to give his characters back stories and Achilles' heels that go beyond the norm. It is a fine example of a genre that should exist but doesn't. In that sense it not only defines the genre, you could say it is the genre.

I am keen to read more. Robinson, Petit's first novel from 1993, sounds like my cup of tea,

Watchman - Ian Rankin

Watchman is Rankin's third novel, after Flood, which I loved, and the first Inspector Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, which I bought when it first came out in paperback and thought was very poor. Watchman, reasonably enough, sits somewhere between the two.  Like Knots it is genre fiction and thus does not aim as high as Flood.  In this instance it is spy fiction, written very much in the aftermath of watching the Smiley adaptations on TV.  Miles Flint is a silly name, but no sillier than George Smiley, and as with Smiley the name is the direct opposite of the man.  Smiley never smiled - or, at least, not as if he meant it - and Miles Flint is neither well-travelled nor especially hard.

Flint is a watchman, an organiser of surveillance.  One of his key operations goes horribly wrong.  He seems to have been forgiven but soon realises he hasn't.  Machinations are in progress for the top job at MI5, as they always seem to be in sub le Carre fiction, and Miles finds himself caught in the crosshairs.  He is despatched to Ulster, still - in 1988 - embroiled in the Troubles, betrayed and left to fend for himself.  Can he rise to the occasion?  That is the nub of the book but it is far too long in coming.  Really what we have here is three stories rather crudely bolted together.  It cries out for depth and knowledge of the human condition that sets le Carre apart.

It's an immature work by a young writer still trying to find his voice.  There's nothing wrong in that - on these foundations Rankin built one of the great literary careers.  It's well worth reading and judging on its own merits.  But you wouldn't want to read it twice.

Disappeared - Anthony Quinn

Disappeared is Anthony Quinn's first novel, and allowances must be made.  On the positive side, a story about the 'disappeared' of the Ulster Troubles is current and compelling.  Quinn's descriptions of the shores of Lough Neagh are spellbinding and sometimes downright beautiful.  On the negative side, the plot is preposterous, there are far too many characters to keep track of, and pretty well all of them are more interesting than Quinn's lacklustre protagonist DI Celsius Daly yes, the name is the only interesting trait).  On the whole, the positives just outweigh the negatives.  I read it to the end, otherwise it wouldn't be here on my blog.  The denouement was a bit disappointing - somewhat of a deus ex machina.  Also, am I right in thinking that diesel isn't easily flammable, thus not the weapon of choice for your averagely intelligent teenage arsonist?

Personally, I won't be revisiting Inspector Daly again in a hurry.  That shouldn't put anyone else off - I hated the first Rebus novels when they came out, and look what happened with them.