The crucial test for any book is whether it keeps you turning the pages to see what happens next, and the latest novel from Peter Cunningham certainly does that.
The premise is original: the central character is an Irish civil servant in Dublin working for M15 during the Troubles. The first thirty or so pages skip backward and forward in time while introducing a host of characters before it settles into its stride as a reasonably well paced thriller.
Marty Ranson is of mixed Irish Catholic/English Protestant heritage, and grew up in a 'Big House' in Co Waterford. Hewas sent to boarding school in Britain and later serves in the British Army in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. On returning to Ireland he is recruited to M15 while working for the Department of External Affairs in Dublin during the 1960s.
He regards himself as Irish, and his real home as being the house where his cousin Iggy lived in Waterford city with his grandmother and assorted uncles and aunts. Iggy moves to Armagh and becomes involved with the IRA in later years. As an agent for the British government, Marty has to choose where his real allegiance lies. The plot is predictable in many ways, but is crafted well enough to keep you reading.
Charlie Haughey and his involvement in the Arms Crisis, as well as other real events like Bloody Sunday are featured. It is a fraught exercise using real events in fiction, especially when it concerns atrocities that still affect living people. One particularly notorious IRA attack is a pivotal moment in the book, but the circumstances are fictionalised and presented as fact. Marty - a senior Irish diplomat, no less - muses that everyone knows no-one will ever be brought to justice, given what he perceives as connivance and incompetence on the part of the security forces in Ireland. This suits the book's themes of deception and betrayal but seems somehow at odds with the fact that the Taoiseach at the time was the late Fine Gael leader Liam Cosgrave. He was elected to get tough on crime and it was, after all, the era of the so-called Garda 'Heavy Gang'.
Credulity is stretched badly on occasion, particularly in the action sequences as described in the book. The author seems to be aware of this, and has the MI5 agents describing one of their own operations as "foolish", "idiotic" and "a farce".
The Irish Catholic characters do not come out well. At times the novel reads like a cross between Angela's Ashes and The Butcher Boy. Marty Ransom's Irish relations are depicted as unpleasant and odd. In contrast, British M15 agents are charming and reasonable and 1960s London is lovingly described in terms of its imperial grandeur. Marty generally accepts that being a British spy is the "honourable thing to do".
It is, after all, a work of fiction and succeeds in maintaining interest but overall I did not find it particularly convincing.
John Kilraine
