by Jonathan Lee (Heinemann, £16.99)
“There are large gaps in what is known about the bombing of the Grand Hotel,” writes Jonathan Lee in the afterword to High Dive, his third novel, “and I have tried, over the last few years, to imagine myself into those gaps.”
The gap that Lee exploits most audaciously is the possibility that a second, uncaught IRA man might have helped Patrick Magee plant a bomb in Room 629 of the Brighton Grand Hotel, six weeks before it hosted the 1984 Conservative conference. Into this gap he has imagined Dan, an electrician living with his widowed mother on an ever-more-hostile Loyalist street. Dan is set on the IRA when we meet him, but Lee charts his hardening in the cause, and evokes the atmosphere of siege and hatred that enables it.
Two other point-of-view characters give us a Brighton side to the story: Philip “Moose” Finch, once a not-quite-Olympic diver, now the Grand’s thwarted deputy general manager; and Freya, his daughter, working reception in the wake of her A-levels, waiting for her life to start.
For a novel that begins with an IRA initiation and builds to an explosion, High Dive is wonderfully un-thriller-like: it cares most about the smaller dramas between planting and detonation, between the high board and the pool.
At times it’s a touch too literary. As Dan wires the bomb’s long timer, his internal monologue paraphrases John Updike: “A poetry even to the grimmest of things. Everything given its beautiful due.” But when the writing relaxes, as in Moose and Freya’s scenes, at least some of that beautiful due is given.
“There are large gaps in what is known about the bombing of the Grand Hotel,” writes Jonathan Lee in the afterword to High Dive, his third novel, “and I have tried, over the last few years, to imagine myself into those gaps.”
The gap that Lee exploits most audaciously is the possibility that a second, uncaught IRA man might have helped Patrick Magee plant a bomb in Room 629 of the Brighton Grand Hotel, six weeks before it hosted the 1984 Conservative conference. Into this gap he has imagined Dan, an electrician living with his widowed mother on an ever-more-hostile Loyalist street. Dan is set on the IRA when we meet him, but Lee charts his hardening in the cause, and evokes the atmosphere of siege and hatred that enables it.
Two other point-of-view characters give us a Brighton side to the story: Philip “Moose” Finch, once a not-quite-Olympic diver, now the Grand’s thwarted deputy general manager; and Freya, his daughter, working reception in the wake of her A-levels, waiting for her life to start.
For a novel that begins with an IRA initiation and builds to an explosion, High Dive is wonderfully un-thriller-like: it cares most about the smaller dramas between planting and detonation, between the high board and the pool.
At times it’s a touch too literary. As Dan wires the bomb’s long timer, his internal monologue paraphrases John Updike: “A poetry even to the grimmest of things. Everything given its beautiful due.” But when the writing relaxes, as in Moose and Freya’s scenes, at least some of that beautiful due is given.
