Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

The narrative is gripping from the first page. Settling into it on a customer-less Saturday afternoon I thought I’d be able to read it through at one sitting but alas, sleep intervened. It sustains interest (and excitement) because of the consistency of the voice that tells the story.

For me, the narrator and central figure recalls the late JP Donleavy’s creation in the 1955 novel The Ginger Man. Banned at the time in the US and Ireland for its explicitness, it told the story of an American in post-war Dublin, frequently drunk and in fights, falling for women. The tone is melancholy and poetic, the stance that of an outsider, an Ishmael figure, arousing opposition wherever he goes.

Marco McGann is conspicuously ‘not nice’. He drives dangerously, consumes narcotics and alcohol by the shedload, and is frequently involved in a tussle, the violence of which we suspect he quite enjoys. More than that, we are diverted to people’s gross personal habits and Marco, while he does not necessarily share them, informs of us of such detail as a shirtsleeve that just will not roll up. We are right there with him. This is the nitty-gritty of living. It is the little things that bring you down.

And ‘down’ is where we find Marco at the opening of the novel. He has taken to his bed. Dean-Richards though, presents a far-from-static situation and one in which Marco, for all his faults, emerges as something of a hero. Assisted by Tommy Gigger, a lifelong buddy whose thinking capability seems to be aided rather than impaired by vast intake of weed, he sets out to recover his kidnapped ex-girlfriend. As he does so he discovers layer upon layer of corruption in the technology firm Rhoder and Dalt, from whose employment he has recently been ‘let go’. It also has served as the initial meeting-place for Marco and Sarah, the ex.

His search for Sarah takes to her family-members, all grotesque in their particular ways. There is the sister Lucy, clearly complicit in the abduction, arrogantly materialist, her pricey home in a constant state of spendthrift tasteless upgrading. The gangster-ish father who ‘hated that I didn’t talk to him like he shit bubblegum’ and then their associate Stant, who has combined kidnap and brainwashing with embezzlement of local post offices through dodgy software.

There are good people too. Gigger’s red-eyed scrutiny of stolen files leads to the discomfiture of the criminals. On the way we meet – gently humorised – Mrs Dixon and Mr Thatcher, similarly old, separately bereaved, both keys in unlocking the mystery. Amber the pub tenant, with whom I wanted Marco to get together. The agency worker Jerry Mathews who allows Marco to break security at Rhoder and Dalt. Even seen through Marco’s hardbitten lens these are lovely people.

I found one or two scenes difficult to follow, such as when Marco escapes a ravening guard dog through a skylight, but that’s because I am unused to the thriller genre. But Marco?  is more than a thriller. His world is one that we recognise – short-term employment, people grossly rich, overall absence of self-restraint towards money. Physically too – Oldon and Warrester cannot be other than Oldbury and Worcester. Birmingham city centre is not named but indicated by landmarks. And Marco’s taking a stand against entrenched power – we are with him in his terrible adventures, all the way.