Allan Guthrie’s ‘Slammer’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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Sep 092011

A claustrophobic scream through the dark recesses of human behaviour, Allan Guthrie’s Slammer is a worthy read for those with a sense of grim curiosity as to the bestial cunning residing within the civilised mind. This morbid Scotsman presents an ugly exploration of what goes on when the lights go out, the hideous cruelty that occurs when ordinary decent respect is dispensed with and the law of the jungle prevails. Reminiscent of that sick guilty terror that accompanies schoolyard victimisation, that anarchic excitement that becomes all too real with no responsible adult present, this is a knife-edge thriller of considerable panache and skill. Yet in the world of schoolyard horrors, a teacher always comes running, someone’s parents usually find out and nobody wants to go to the principal’s office. When the sanity of everyday adult life is suspended, when the rules-of-engagement go out the window… what happens?

Slammer revolves around Nicholas Glass, a young prison officer, detailing his descent as he proves unable to cope with the stresses of the job. Guthrie treads a fine line between sympathy and ridicule, allowing his reader to empathise with our antihero’s disintegrating family life, his disarmingly pathetic sense of selfhood. Essentially though, Glass is a sap. A walkover, an out-and-out softy, an utter wuss, with his heart in exactly the wrong place. Struggling time and again to deal with the circumstances of which he’s a victim, you’ll find yourself in constant disbelief at his poor decision-making, concurrently hoping against hope that he’ll somehow come out on top. Meanwhile there’s an element of trainwreck-fascination to the plot development, a disbelief that poor old Glass can fall so far, so fast, so hard. Guthrie wields considerable skill in convincing us to suspend our disbelief throughout the novel, an admirable feat that leads to a sense of culpability, a gnawing paranoia that we too are somehow responsible.

The escalating manic desperation is rabid, almost psychedelic in its unreality, yet all the more terrifying for its utterly convincing delivery. Guthrie carefully constructs a panopticon of paranoid terror, a hideous state of constant fear. The author is economical with his prose, leaving just enough to the imagination and ensuring that a hint is enough to let his reader’s imagination plummet into ever-darkening pits of misery. Brutally engaging similes and chilling metaphors continually build the oppressive static tension of the Hilton, as its denizens call the modern Scottish prison in which the novel is set. The descent is relentless, Glass’ nightmare ever worsening. Crucially, the madness remains entertaining without being ridiculous, fun though chilling, such elements being reminiscent of the novels of Thomas Harris (The Silence Of The Lambs, etc).

As Glass slips into addiction and paranoid schizophrenia, matters steadily become more nebulous and the author does an excellent job of imparting to his reader the psychotic terror of a drug-splintered mind. The feckless protagonist backs himself into a series of corners, attempting to play the various criminals and prison guards off against each other in a manner far too sophisticated for his addled semi-consciousness. Yet the convoluted series of events leading to the climax becomes so detailed that it’s hard to maintain credibility, and to a certain extent the novel begins to run out of steam towards the end. A deft hand ultimately wins out, and Guthrie reels the wayward elements back in to tie things up with a stylish climax reminiscent of dark modern cinema, a vivid and uncomfortable joyride recalling psychedelic crime thrillers The Machinist or Memento.

Clever and engaging, complicated but undemanding, with a primitive sophistication in its scope, Slammer is a great read and one which never cheapens itself by taking the easy way out. Concurrently making some valid (if grisly) points about memory, guilt and psychosis, Guthrie transcends the rigid dichotomies which all too often cast our heroes and villains in easily dismissed shades of black and white; I for one will be eager to see where the future takes this talented author.

Posted by Len Wanner at 5:35 pm Tagged with: , ,

Simon Logan’s ‘Katja from the Punk Band’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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Aug 182011

With a slick design and cover reminiscent of a top-drawer fanzine or edgy RPG, Katja from the Punk Band’s presentation prepares the reader for a hi-octane scream of cyberpunk paranoia. Concerning the eponymous heroine’s attempts to escape the dystopian nightmare island upon which she resides, we follow an escalating series of events as a vial of narcotics continually switches hands in a violent and desperate rush to the finish.

First impressions are that the writer’s style doesn’t quite match his enthusiasm; rather than sleek and sassy, the tone is somewhat adolescent and grasping. Somewhat unlikely choices and coincidences crowd in right from the opening pages, and “dangerous” or “edgy” signifiers of squats, piercings and wild haircuts fail to have the effect I suspect the author desires. Character development is utterly absent; the title tells you everything you need to know about our heroine. Nikolai, a sniveling junkie turd central to the story’s opening, is reported to chew his nails so often and so viciously that one eventually begins to suspect that he might be related to Vishnu. What’s really shocking is that he survives long enough to become something of a main player.

Like Nikolai, each character has a Special Move; Katja “tongues her lip piercing” incessantly whilst Kohl (The Cyberpunk Baddie With Red Welding Goggles) is obsessed with order. Cue endless static metaphors about motherboards, computer chips, etc ad nauseam. The illicit romance between our heroine’s parole officer Aleksakhina (The Tough But Fair Parole Cop) and the dealer’s mistress (The Platinum Blonde Ex-Gymnast) is clumsy and weird, a farcical hook thrown into a fetid pond with no bait attached. There’s literally no reason to care about either of them, no explanation as to what fuels their desires. Katja stupidly carries her guitar with her everywhere, whether running, jumping, shooting or hiding. This isn’t kooky or endearing. It’s dumb. It’s unbelievably stupid and annoying. Nikolai is utterly devoted to the distinctly unenigmatic Katja and all that springs to mind is “why?”. She’s capricious and boring, leading one to the conclusion that Simon Logan has an unrequited passion for dismissive punk girls. Surely there’s some better way of dealing with it than inflicting a bad novel on innocent readers.

Attempts to inject passion and feeling too often fall flat while thrusts towards gritty realism seem oafish and hackneyed. Granted, there are occasional stronger elements of empathy-building in relation to characters who’d previously seemed little more than shadows: “He thinks that this must be what it is like to have a mother when you are growing up.” Yet truthfully, it speaks volumes that this is the best example there is of character development. Generally, there is absolutely no reason to care about any of these fools. Bizarrely, Logan feels it’s acceptable to kill off one character after another only to have them miraculously return whenever he feels like shifting gear. Again, this is hilariously stupid. The overarching narrative method is to endlessly repeat situations and even dialogue from multiple characters’ perspectives. Were this employed but once in the whole novel, it may have been alluring. Taken as a genuine narrative strategy, it’s unforgivably amateurish and provokes suspicion that such is merely a way of filling pages.

Potentially dramatic situations are unforgivably skirted over and dismissed while others are inexplicably spotlighted, magnifying their tedium and obviousness. At the very least, this book could have done with a good editor to cut out the unnecessary and somewhat repetitive dialogue, which is tawdry, a bore, almost farcical in its numbing repetitiveness. The narrative voice itself is annoyingly humdrum, that of a self-consciously bad-tempered teenager with a penchant for incessantly overusing the same swear words. Rather than any character being granted some level of first-person agency or any kind of unique identity, we’re led to believe that the interior monologue of each is uniformly bland in an uncreatively foul-mouthed way. Logan’s vocabulary is strikingly limited. I’m no prude and rarely shy away from a well-timed “fuck”, but seemingly no-one has informed the author that the English language contains pejorative terms other than “fuck”. Indeed, every occurrence throughout the novel is tiresomely framed in terms of negativity to such a degree that one suspects this book could only appeal to the most imagination-starved of teenage cybergoths; “this place spills into life like a virus bursting out of host cells.” Yawn.

Since it remains unexplained, we can infer that the setting is supposed to represent some alternative present or near-future in which people with Russian names act like ‘80s drug dealing Americans in a ‘90s London setting, surrounded by low-level tech in dirty neon-clad streets. The question is, how does such a potentially rich mine become so relentlessly boring? There’s no evidence of a typical Russian hardiness, not even a cartoon Soviet stoicism, which leaves one to conclude that everyone has a Russian name just because it sounds cool. The really annoying thing is that so much time is spent talking about how “the mainland” is so desired by those on “the island” whilst nothing is ever really explained about what each place represents in relation to the other, or indeed why the island population is kept away from the mainland.

I imagine this was intended to inject some element of Kafkaesque psychological suspense into proceedings or evoke a certain nameless weirdness à la Vincenzo Natali‘s films (Cube, Cypher), but the unfortunate fact is that it’s merely irritating and distracting. Almost every locale is a dark room with blacked-out windows cluttered with varied old machinery. Nearly every villain’s outfit seems to be comprised of tight black latex. Logan neglects to exploit the many wealthy sites upon which he touches for the kind of excitement and colour this novel requires. Towards the middle, a sort of car-crash-curiosity takes over, willing the reader to see just how dumb this can get. The book’s ending is as implausible as it is expected: the uncharacteristic actions of Katja sadly at odds with her previous treatment of Nikolai. It’s unfortunate that more couldn’t be made of this. By the closing chapters I’m wondering whether Katja and her whole sorry charade is in fact one huge in-joke, a not-so-subtle parody of some subgenre to which I’m not privy: “That strange feeling in her chest, could that be guilt? More likely indigestion.” More likely embarrassment.

The only good thing about this book is the cover, and that’s not even that great. I’m appalled that this was published. Whereas a plethora of pointless crime novels are slung out every year by undiscerning publishers to fill airport bookracks and train station newsagents, at whom is this aimed? Subculture deviants? Bored housewives? Sordid business types with a fetish for punk girls? Ham-fisted and irritating, this should never have gone further than an internet blog. Annoying annoying annoying. Really, I’m appalled. This man stole perhaps eight hours from me and I want them back. Ultimately, I’m not sure what Simon Logan is trying to do here, but it’s annoying and cheap. Modern cheap sci-fi pap, like a 9th rate William Gibson meets 2000AD. With the visuals and atmosphere left to a solid artist, perhaps Simon Logan could be a competent short-run comics writer. But he’s no novelist. Not at this stage.

Posted by Len Wanner at 1:21 pm Tagged with: , ,

Doug Johnstone’s ‘Smokeheads’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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Aug 122011

With Smokeheads, rather than the regrettable marijuana related hi-jinks I was expecting, the plot revolves around four university friends who reunite for a trip to Islay, the remote Scottish island renowned the world over for its splendid whiskies. Naturally, they end up in all sorts of bother. Doug Johnstone provides us with a grand yarn the like of which is rarely seen, more so in terms of the plot than in the actual execution, since this sort of murder and mayhem is the last thing one would expect in such a setting and among such people. Yet the narrative is well-paced and mainly credible, allowing us entry into this world of madness and intoxication.

Indeed, the book’s main strength is the whiskey element; it’s endlessly endearing and opens up the humanity of the characters, concentrating upon the small pleasures of life and allowing the author to share his obvious enthusiasm for the golden nectar. The reader feels invited into a locals-only lock-in, the scene and setting granting us access to a secret world. In a way, the whiskey itself becomes a character in the novel, a mentor pressing the main players ever onward. The four mates are an unlikely bunch, well-illustrating the manner in which those who effortlessly become friends at an earlier age can often end up inhabiting entirely different worlds. Whereas our “in”, main protagonist Adam Strachan, is a likeable hangdog who we hope to see pull through, his former friend and current drinking buddy Roddy is expressly set up to fail. A high-earning investment fund manager, he’s as smarmy as they come, and it’s a howl to witness him burn through friendships and sympathy on a coke-fuelled rampage across the island. Luke The Bohemian and Ethan The Average Guy make up the party and provide a fine tempering influence on the other two, counteracting Adam’s anxiety and Roddy’s bullishness in a satisfying manner. It’s a well-paced, engrossing read, and the characters are just sympathetic (or irritating) enough that you never feel any real drag. There is the occasionally crass sentimentality to certain thoughts which go through Adam’s mind: “this struggle for survival would tether them to each other until the grave”, yet for the main part such elements are easily put aside.

As the plot develops and the island villains show their true faces, a hefty dose of the old suspension of disbelief is necessary, though never to the point where disgust takes over after one liberty too many is taken. In fact, it’s all a lot of fun: these types do exist, and situations like these certainly do take place. The atmospheric touches to Islay life along with the character of the local people and settings adds a nice spark and draws the reader in like a wood fire on a winter’s night. Yet unfortunately it’s merely a touch; this could have been explored more deeply and concertedly. Madcap scenes of violence and pandemonium in the latter stages are occasionally let down by a flippant humour which isn’t quite plausible given the horrific nature of certain situations. In the novel’s defence, this sarcastic, rough-around-the-edges humour is a constant throughout and it is generally peppered with pleasing linguistic devices to cajole even the most demanding of readers.

Around the halfway mark, matters begin to unravel somewhat. As the plot reaches its apex, a string of unlikely coincidences becomes difficult to credit. A hostage/kidnap situation gets a bit too Die Hard for this reviewer’s liking and things are by now a touch too obviously signposted. The author still has a certain something, a little extra that stokes the fires and keeps the pages turning… which is precisely what’s so frustrating about this novel; right at the high point it becomes untenable. The cold-blooded random killing of a man in an explicitly violent way in front of his friends would elicit more than mere exclamations of shock. There would be havoc, vomiting, wide-eyed delirium. The plot gets extremely, viscerally gory towards the latter part of the narrative, and those with stomachs of anything less than cast iron will surely feel a twinge or two as the plot continues to fall apart. By the end, descriptions seem somewhat lacksadaisical, a drudge through loose ends. What’s more, with the quantity our protagonist is drinking he’d certainly pass out.

The finale feels forced and pointless, farcical and almost silly, unlikely characters cast in roles of heroism, stoically imparting sense and moral wisdom to the reader when at this point it’s hard to feel anything other than “who cares…?”. This would have best been left as it was in the middle, perhaps elevated to the level of a grim conspiracy in the Wicker Man style or suspended in mystery. Instead, I’m left with a similar feeling to watching a dog eat its own vomit. Why does such a harsh note enter an otherwise positive reading experience? Frankly, this book is far better than the previous comment may seem to indicate, and it’s only because the narrative had reached such alluring highs that it ultimately feels like such a let-down. Smokeheads is a high-spirited, vicious romp through Scotland’s whiskey soaked, peat-fired distilleries, and while it’s amusing enough, Doug Johnstone’s best is certainly yet to come.

Posted by Len Wanner at 9:45 am Tagged with: , ,

Adrian McKinty’s ‘Falling Glass’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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Jul 292011

Adrian McKinty’s fifth novel, Falling Glass, is an absolute joy to read. Witty from the outset, the narrative concentrates on retired gang enforcer Killian’s return to the field for one last job; neck-deep in debt, he’s lured back to track down a millionaire’s wife in return for a big payout. With style and panache, the story moves at breakneck speed from page one right up to the genuinely impressive finale. Perfectly evocative of both local scenes and global vistas, the author’s allusions to a world of consummate darkness take on a far bleaker hue than similar novels in the psycho-killer vein. This is entirely due to a willingness to situate them in reality: Mexican narcotráfico beheadings; the white slave trade; paedophilia. With a deft hand, the Carrickfergus native skilfully evokes the modern global village from Bangladeshis in Ballymena to Russians in Roscommon. This is an important aspect of the narrative – Ireland’s place in the greater global context. Yet despite the fact that McKinty decides to exploit the morbid fascination with which the IRA tends to be regarded, it’s never done in a cheap way. In fact, a great strength of the novel is that Northern Ireland is depicted as more than just a disposable backdrop to its most infamous denizens. Ulster is instead given fair treatment from the stout hardiness of its people to the wild beauty of its countryside.

Such dedication to hard-working characterisation is present throughout Falling Glass, the text full of small touches which keep the characters human, all stock caricatures left at the auction house. Even the most cartoonish of figures are invested with some level of humanity, granting them a blessed, horrific sense of authenticity. The millionaire’s fugitive wife Rachel Coulter is invested with a real sense of pathos; one really feels the character from the book’s onset, her tough demeanour earning our admiration whilst concurrently provoking irritation. Rachel has a touch of Ree Dolly to her, the ice-sharp heroine of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, remaining the caring matriarch whilst prey to both Killian and the mysterious Russian hitman, Markov. An ultra-modern killer, ex-military with a complex code of honour and nerves of steel, the inclusion of his personal life and a past which tortures him ensure that he never becomes a dismissible 2D villain. Ultimately, it’s Killian who provides the real draw here; making him an itinerant (a tinker or Pavee, as the text terms them) is a bold move, and a great one. It adds an air of the exotic to the familiar aspects of Killian, even for those to whom Ireland presents no mystery. He is fantastic as the reluctant hero, the gun for hire with a heart of gold. Surprisingly philosophical, ritualistic even, Killian is akin to a modern day back-alley shaman.

Falling Glass contains a multifaceted resonance common to the comic book genre, reminiscent of the graphic novels of Garth Ennis, evocative perhaps of Cassidy from his classic Preacher series or even Hellblazer’s John Constantine. McKinty’s use of language is superb; a paragraph describing the lighting of a match becomes a masterclass in descriptive prose. This is a real strength of the author: poise. Effortlessly balancing the reader on a knife-edge within the mean half of a page, curiosity piqued at every turn, a suspect thread hanging loose at every seam… Meanwhile, expert plotting, deep empathy, and a strong story ensure that the reader remains keen to witness each thread unravel. Nothing is spelled out and there are frequent little extras hidden within the crystalline prose, multifarious cultural references coming hard and fast. This is exactly what this brand of contemporary hardboiled fiction requires – symmetry, presence, and an aching familiarity. All told, the author’s tendency to overestimate the reader is an extremely satisfying aspect to his writing.

Big, bloody, violent, and convincing in its colour, McKinty’s prose bleeds bright red in gouts of cinematic candour. Smart, comfortable similes turn up the corners of your mouth, putting you right between the pages in a manner which is clever but never smarmy, funny without being glib. There’s an endearing dusting of real Ulster charm here, a certain hardy merriness and a keen sense of bullshit to McKinty’s writing – and that’s meant in the best possible way. It’s utterly Irish in its willingness to spin a yarn a mile wide, executed so stylishly that you’ll not just buy into it, but buy the author a pint and beg him to continue. Rather than regressing to an (all-too-common) regrettably post-millennial Celtic chic, this novel instead evokes a sense of the ‘now’. This is the real modern Ireland, free from crass paraphernalia but with reassuring cartoon stylishness.

Easy to read, full of deep juicy symbolism, and with a lyrical ear, Falling Glass keeps its reader ensnared throughout. Never predictable, never reneging to a humdrum connect-the-dots farce, its plot is so overarching, so well thought-out, that it’s reminiscent of the heyday of Tom Clancy or John Grisham. McKinty shows his experience by setting up rivalries and bringing showdowns to a point, rather than leaving them festering in a cheap attempt to add depth. He also provides a refreshing, original, and timely reappraisal of the nomadic traveller clans of Ireland, not overly romanticised or sensationalised, merely distinct from common (mis-) conceptions of the Pavee. In short, Falling Glass is a crime novel for both genre aficionados and those who reckon they don’t read crime novels: highly recommended.

Posted by Len Wanner at 9:12 am Tagged with: , ,

Megan Abbott’s ‘Queenpin’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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Jul 242011

In Queenpin, Megan Abbott takes hardboiled noir back to her bedroom and has her wicked way with it; she strips it down and ties it up, ensuring that it will never be the same again. These are the girls who Raymond Chandler never knew quite as well as he might have liked to… who Walter Mosley got close to, very close to, but never this close. It is utterly refreshing.

The story is ostensibly that of a bright young ‘50s girl: savvy, intelligent, hungry for excitement, but lacking the street smarts she thinks she’s got. And she’s hot; her narrative voice, her sass, her cleverness – it’s hot as hell. The plot heats up fast and accelerates from there to the finish line, never stopping for breath. We follow our young narrator’s quicksilver apprenticeship to Gloria Denton, a gangster moll twenty-to-thirty years her senior, electric with deadpan eyes and a cool brow. There’s no moral decline and no spectacular fall; our heroine never bothered buying-in and accepts the consequences from day one -all she wants is more, always more. There’s a thin, surgical edge of visceral desperation which creeps in midway through the novel to replace the earlier sense of wanton daring. The relationship between the two central females has a challenging, sexual, almost abusive tone, the young apprentice caught between stark helpless admiration and a mad consuming terror. The characters are a uniformly remorseless bunch, hard-headed lifers who know the wages of sin yet still try to run. We watch and we grin as our heroine slides deeper and deeper into the criminal underworld, downplaying a tell-tale association here, turning a blind eye to a warning sign there. She breaks all the rules, most especially those which she makes for herself. The odds keep stacking up and the violence, when it comes, is neither glorified nor overstated. It is desperate, messy and undignified, with a quick shot of drama and a lot of blood.

The author’s true skill is in allowing the reader to see more than the narrator will admit to herself, to feel as if we know her better even than the writer herself. Yet she keeps just enough from us, preserving the exotic allure of our anti-heroine. And though we know something’s coming, we’ve no idea what, when, where. Keeping the fires stoked, Abbott knows just when to throw in some filth, and not just a suggestive fancy-tickler, not just a ripped-stocking backseat tumble, but honest, forthright, filthy allusions to raw, aching sex that, to their credit, never deviate into crassly pornographic territory. Just enough is left to the imagination.

With an economy of sentiment wrapped in gorgeously luxuriant prose, the author holds court from the opening sentence onwards: the entire novel is a seduction. The eloquence displayed is so daringly arrogant that one soon neglects to really admire the elegant style, the story itself being entirely absorbing. Megan Abbott constructs fantastically believable living, breathing archetypes – the bulletproof blonde, the chronic gambler – and then rips the shroud away to reveal the raw, hulking, fallen humanity beneath. Rather than signposting, Abbott trusts her reader, credits her audience with intelligence. Reading Queenpin, one becomes a co-conspirator, a trusted confidante. Or perhaps not trusted – perhaps just convenient, simply present after a whiskey sour or three. The seductive tone is alluring, attractive, yet reckless. Sharp as a blade, though it’s unclear at whom the sharp end is pointed. It’s a wonderful stew of clichés and sucker punches, marshalled with considerable strength in the most convincing manner. Abbott has an alley-poet’s way with words, all blustery alliteration and sordid slickness. Her similes are divine:

‘Somehow she saw something in me, something in the face like a bar of soap, plain, unshaped, ready for dirt. Made for it!’

Abbott has no fear of coarseness, as it’s a vile world we’re dealing with, yet she refuses to sling curse words about or gratify easy allusions to cheap thrills. She saves them, savours them, deploying them at only the most appropriate moments. There’s a lecherous charm to the novel that feels akin to conducting an affair; a sense of danger, of guilt, of irresistible urges tinged with self-reproach. The vernacular speech is second-to-none, utterly convincing, the dialogue rapier sharp and keen as a knife.

Holding a lyrical air as reminiscent of Nick Cave as it is of the heavyweights of detective fiction, there are considerable depths to Queenpin and Megan Abbott. If she continues in this vein she will have claimed her place alongside the greats within the decade.

Posted by Len Wanner at 9:09 am Tagged with: ,

Ken Bruen’s ‘American Skin’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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Jul 162011

With just enough bite and charm to keep the reader engaged, American Skin is a cartoon crime thriller one part Stephen King, one part Karen Slaughter, all conceived through an Irish lens. The plot revolves around a bank heist gone wrong, its desperate aftermath taking our protagonist Stephen Blake from Ireland to New York and finally journeying deep into America’s heartland. The book’s chapters are short, to-the-point and easily digested; it soon becomes clear that things are aligning towards an epic showdown between Blake and his nemesis, the psychotic speedfreak Dade. There’s a touch of the Western to American Skin; the Byronic hero headed for the inevitable fall and subsequent empty absolution, the unrepentantly monstrous vision of crime and criminality, the innocent girl caught up in an outlaw world. While sometimes charming, such broad swathes tend to come from a limited palette, which occasionally catches in an irritating manner.

Given the title, it’s ironically the Irish experience which seems most convincingly vital, whilst the coarse Americana which peppers the text comes across as a tad forced. The Irish voices work well, for the main part, persuasively vivid and full of cultural references as they are. Unsurprising, given that Bruen’s a Galway native. Yet with the book published in the U.S. and having a title seemingly chosen to attract an American audience, it feels as though written for an expressly American readership. Disappointing then that the American dialogue is not entirely convincing.

Bruen is at his best when flippantly detailing Republican hardman Stapleton’s murderous cavorting around Antrim, or Blake’s arsing about with a vengeance in the British army. It’s obvious that the author is having the time of his life writing such characters, and this is where the novel really shines. Bruen succeeds in assembling a fine battalion of amusing personalities: Dade is an arch-villain of the highest order, pure badness, a nihilistic cartoon fruitcake and fun to tolerate. Sherry, the ice-cold she-wolf, is superb, and deserving of a bigger part in the narrative. The New York section of the book works best when laced with anecdotes of Steve’s slain pal Tommy, and the author does a fine job of imparting the immigrant’s sense of wonder, the clean-slate scream of freedom, of infinite possibility and lack of consequence.

Yet Bruen overplays this trump card, indulging in unnecessary explanations of Irish terms despite the inclusion of a light-heartedly whimsical glossary. This leads one to notice just how thick the ‘Oirishness’ is laid on; considering that the novel is written primarily for an American audience, it’s perhaps understandable…yet galling nonetheless. An out-and-out dyed-in-the-wool Belfast native would neither pronounce the word Jesus in the phonetic “Jaysus” of the text, nor would he use the term “yokes”. Similarly irritating are a number of textual, phrasal and phonetic errors, beginning on page two with the phrase “beaten her to an inch of her life”. The text is full of odd metaphors and clunky similes; we’re told that our protagonist “veered twixt the two like a nun on a bicycle” or was “happy as a pig in a basket”. Were such phrases to occur just once or twice, they’d be unremarkable. Yet with their continual inclusion, the text soon becomes hammy and clichéd, inviting dismissal. Repeating “that’s all she wrote” to underscore a significant event would be irritating were it to occur only twice in the entire novel; twice within a couple of chapters invites derision.

The strangest element here is that the story begins to run out of steam just on the cusp of the grand finale, with Bruen delaying the final conflict through idiosyncratically irrelevant sidelines such as literal descriptions from episodes of Friends or The Sopranos, featureless repetitions of points already well made and an irritating tendency to recycle initially endearing textual devices: “I didn’t know, said, ‘I don’t know’.”

What really comes across is that the author could have done with a tough editor to straighten out the seams, or at the very least correct typos. Time and again Bruen breaks the golden rule: show, don’t tell. It’s completely disruptive of the story’s flow and catches a little harder on each successive occasion, which is a real pity, as the characters and story are decent. To put it in the author’s own words, “he was, to coin a phase [sic], a little too loose a cannon’.

In American Skin‘s favour, it’s addictively compulsive reading, and you’ll wolf down the chapters like Dade does pills, streaking through the book in a day or three. The plot is built with care and a finely-developed sense of poise and timing, and Bruen’s strength is an audacious aptitude for taking imaginatively conceived characters and shunting them into barely credible yet enjoyable situations. The local colour is convincing, the weight of experience evident, and such elements are perfectly capable of standing alone; as such, it’s utterly unnecessary to quantify a phrase like ‘an Irish measure’ with the parenthesised ‘(generous)’ when describing the pouring of a drink, an exercise which is patronising at best.

Essentially, American Skin does not read like a finished draft. The final act rushes by in a barely fleshed-out tying-up of loose ends rather than the bombastic shoot-out everyone’s waiting for, and everything ends unsatisfactorily. If you’re going to play by the clichés, it’s just not kosher to revoke them all at the last minute. Ultimately, this is an airport kiosk novel. It does have its charms, but plot inconsistencies and a disarmingly lax approach to detail let down what is an otherwise solid crime thriller.

Posted by Len Wanner at 8:58 am Tagged with: , ,
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