High Dive by Jonathan Lee: a strong swimmer out of his depth

High Dive

Author: Jonathan Lee

ISBN-13: 978-0434023370

Publisher: William Heinemann

Guideline Price: £16.99

The images endure: Norman Tebbit, the Tory MP, on a stretcher, his face twisted in pain; a woman in a fur coat, her face bloody and dazed, her coat and dress covered in bomb dust; the gaudily stuccoed facade of the Grand Hotel in Brighton collapsed in on itself.

The IRA’s bombing of the Conservative Party conference on October 12th, 1984, was another bloody marker in the turbulent reign of Margaret Thatcher: five dead; many lives destroyed.

Jonathan Lee draws on this bleak episode for his third novel. The investigation of the bombing found that one of the bomb team had signed the hotel register under the name Roy Walsh. Patrick Magee was convicted of the bombing, but Walsh was never found. Lee reinvents him as Dan, an 18-year-old Belfast man, and sets out to create a trajectory that takes him from the streets of the city to the bathroom of room 127 of the Grand Hotel, where the bomb was planted.

Fiction that dovetails with real events is not new. It is important that writers address the world around them with urgency and jeopardy, and cross into the political sphere if that’s what is required. All of this involves risk of a sort. There is a danger of getting it wrong, of crossing lines. Victims of calamitous events demand authenticity in the retelling of them. The initial hurt is compounded by untruth.

A writer cannot command every detail, but there is a responsibilty to be rigorous, and too many of the Irish sections of High Dive lack that rigour.

There are minor discrepancies. Saracen armoured cars were never painted black. Water cannon were deployed only in recent years. Rathcoole is a Protestant area. Some of these could be interpreted as Nordie nitpicking, which is fair enough. But when you aren’t watching your step in the little things, the chances increase of tripping up on the big ones.

The implausibility mounts; the textures are plain wrong. There is a parodic riot, the unlikely killing of an RUC man targeted for attacking Dan’s mother, and the IRA justifying operations with a high-toned stage Irishry.

Still, there are fine lyric passages. “You rode out in the dark outrage of others, saw human loss shaped towards political ends, and though you hoped for the occasional gleam of uncontaminated compassion it seemed that the world was dimming.” But Dan’s introspection cannot be connected to a badly realised world.

In the end the line is irrevocably crossed with a real-life Belfast reference, as misguided as it is misspelt, that should never have been written.

Beyond Belfast

Lee has a cool, metropolitan eye, and when he turns away from the rancours of Belfast his writing is gentle and humane. The true centre of the novel is found in the relationship between the assistant manager of the hotel, Phillip Finch – known as Moose – and his teenage daughter, Freya.

Both have been wounded by the end of Moose’s marriage to the sullen Viv, and there is humanity and tenderness as they do what people do: make accommodations with their pain, try to push it as far away from them as they can and get on with things. Courage is marked by the ability to turn a wry eye on life.

Moose and Freya are swimmers who find grace in the water and on the diving board. The father’s life is marked by a broken marriage and unmet expectations, but he has struck out into a higher element and been elevated by it. A virtuoso is at work in these passages: “Chlorine gave the air up here a hazy, uncrackable quality, everything a chemical blue.”

Dan enters their lives as Roy Walsh and catches Freya’s eye. But he’s on a mission, and detached as he goes about his work. There is no high-wire stuff here, no clock running down, no all to play for. The infiltration of the hotel and the planting of the bomb are low key. There is a fascination with the bombmakers’ arts. Bomb parts are listed minutely: the 555 timer; the 470 kilo-ohm resistor. The attention to detail is striking.

Wider context

The English political context is sidelined or absent altogether. So are the miners’ strike, the Falklands, the wounded country, the feral snarl that seemed a precondition for political leadership, the parapolitics, the feeling that something unwholesome was loose in the machinery of power. This is not the 1984 of David Peace. There is no Miltonic sweep.

That in its way is fair enough. Lee is at home with the finely observed details of lives, the struggle to make things right, and he isn’t inclined to condemnation. But sometimes people do act for the worst of reasons.

In the end you feel for Moose and Freya. They joke, fight, cajole, worry about each other. Their careworn and everyday interactions are more ennobling than those of arch IRA men or self-involved politicians. Moose is dogged in the face of illness and disappointment. Real poignancy gathers about him as the bomb timer ticks towards oblivion. Lee is at his insightful best in the end passages.

Ian Fleming said that his James Bond plots should be improbable but not impossible, but improbable isn't up to the mark when you're talking about specific events and people. In the acknowledgments at the end of High Dive, Lee refers to the stark and monumental volume Lost Lives, which sets out to record and witness each death of the Troubles.

He also mentions Jo Berry, whose father lost his life in the Brighton bombing. Berry now works for peace with Patrick Magee. It would be presumptuous to speculate on her impulse towards forgiveness, but you know it was hard earned. So any writer approaching that territory has to give these things the best possible shot.

Fiction needs writers who don’t turn away, who turn to the real and immediate matter of the world, but you have to keep your eye on what you’re doing. Because, to the people you’re writing about, it is real.

Eoin McNamee's latest novel is Blue Is the Night. He is writer-in-residence at Maynooth University