Fiction:A decade after the event, the strange death of Diana continues to haunt conspiracy theorists and royalists alike. Even when alive, the Princess of Wales was a myth. From virgin bride to jet-set divorcee, the mawkish details of Diana Spencer's sad life dominated the headlines, her downward trajectory casting her as the kind of doomed heroine more familiar to readers of F Scott Fitzgerald than Barbara Cartland.
Yet when the crash came, the romantics took over the fairytale. Whether royalist or republican, anyone who was in Britain on August 31st, 1997, must remember the mood of that day and of the weeks that followed - the dark pall cast over an entire nation, more reminiscent of the passing of a beloved statesman or the outbreak of war.
I shall never forget the ravaged faces on the Rosslare ferry on which I was travelling, nor the long drive across England without benefit of radio, as every programme - including news, traffic reports and weather - was lost beneath an outpouring of inarticulate grief.
The following days brought rotting heaps of floral tributes, world events elbowed aside by arguments about flags, cathedrals and the numbers of bishops required on an altar; even the function of the royal family was seriously questioned, until finally, at last, the "people's princess" was given the funeral she deserved, fascinating and totally tabloid, perhaps in the hope that that would be the end of her.
How wrong that was. Hardly a week has gone by without more "news" of the dead icon - everything from rumours of pregnancy and memorial cock-ups to auctioning her clothes and Mohamed Al-Fayed's wild accusations and relentless demands for a full judicial enquiry; an insistence that has delivered little beyond the serial appointment and resignation of a number of senior judges. Add all that to Stephen Frears's hit film The Queen, this summer's anniversary commemoration of her death with the huge Wembley concert, innumerable media pieces, plus the simultaneous publication of warring biographies, and the Diana industry is looking very healthy indeed.
Now Eoin McNamee has thrown his hat in the ring. Perhaps Blue Tango, his reinvention of a real-life murder and cover-up in Northern Ireland, encouraged him to try. That novel about a judge and his daughter is an undisputed masterpiece. But in 12:23 the author enters less familiar territory, presenting a fictional take on the fatal smash in a Paris underpass, a thriller-style amalgam of old conspiracy theories and well-worn facts. Dark forces are gathered in the empty summer city, obscure individuals with blood-stained pasts, ex-Special Branch, members of police, MI6 and a mysterious cult, as well as the real-life Henri Paul, the Ritz chauffeur who will drive the princess and her playboy to their deaths.
As the days move towards the arrival of Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed, the narrative tracks back and forth between them, the watchers and the watched, hinting at the multiple trails of horror that have led them into this place, jackals lying somnolently in wait of their prey.
PRIME AMONG THEM is the deeply flawed surveillance team of Harper, Bennet and Grace, ex-Northern Ireland operatives reunited by some private individual with a financial interest in Diana Spencer. Next comes their handler, Miami Max, plus a couple of psychotic individuals: a South African motorcyclist and an anti-social photographer in a white Fiat. They, like others, keep a close eye on Henri Paul, noting his preference for a lesbian bar, his allusive girlfriend and a certain air of confidence that suggests more than a stash of unrecorded cash in the bank. Brief visits into Diana's mind and dreams are less convincing. Despite a number of attempts, the author clearly finds it difficult to understand her (indeed, who could?) but since we already know what is to come, she is in any case less interesting than the insidious questions about what everyone else is doing there, and what is being arranged.
McNamee writes whole passages in classic thriller mode, using plain, rather repetitive prose. Perhaps in reaction, the language breaks elsewhere into his own more literary style, sometimes running away with itself into histrionic one-liners. Locations, too, are lit like film noir: in the dying days of August, Paris is always as "grainy" and "monochrome" as his luckless characters. The Bois de Boulogne is "hedged about with grim and magic lore", the suburbs "a landscape which looked as if an insurrection had already swept through, leaving a sullen and war hardened populace in its wake". And despite a certain sense of being manipulated, by the time Diana and Dodi arrive, the reader's appetite for that over-familiar death scene is certainly reawakened.
Nor does it disappoint. The last section of the book is a triumph. By its end, the borderline between truth and McNamee's imagination hardly matters, and a mere accident impossible to believe. Diana Spencer remains, as ever, a blank space at the centre of her old story. But McNamee's chronicle of a death foretold promises what one would have thought impossible - a new dimension to the mythology of her end.
Aisling Foster is a writer and critic
12:23: Paris. 31st August 1997 By Eoin McNamee Faber & Faber, 235pp. £12.99