The murky world Joe Ambrose conjures up of republican terrorism, dope taking, and horrendous murder succeeds because it's mixed with a gentle mocking tone, and a gritty yet fluid dialogue which allow us understand the feelings of his central characters as they are bedded, befuddled or beaten in their world of safe houses, covert meetings, hidden guns, and general student-type carousing.
The tale tells itself easily as Ambrose is comfortable with his background of subterranean rock music, book publishing and a Dublin which is beginning to shed its provincialism and anti-intellectualism. It's a world of plentiful sex without taboo, perhaps, but one of the book's strongest points is its depiction of friendships nurtured at school and continued as Liam, Rory, and an assorted bunch of the confused and the idealistic search for a new world beyond it. Namby-pamby republicans who intend putting away their guns are not the heroes of this book: its sympathy lies with the extremes, the Trotskyites, the rebels on the fringe who eat, drink, and whore together while mammy worries back on the farm. As in all strong writing, there are moments which linger - the visit to the retired priestly headmaster, one to a friend in the Central Mental Hospital, a threesome pleasuring, and violence as a woman friend who has dumped her lover is stalked, enticed back to bed, and viciously attacked. And there is fun, too.
Paul Murray is an Irish Times journalist