Fiction: John McAllister is a graduate of the creative writing course in Trinity College, Dublin and this is his first novel.
A fast- paced thriller set in peace process Belfast, it tells the story of the murky, brutish world of republican and loyalist paramilitaries in conflict over the spoils of money laundering and protection rackets. Life for most of these heartless men is very cheap and utterly disposable. Tension is created with the loyalist Jimmy Terrance's support for the peace process being pitted against an unlikely alliance of rogue IRA men and rogue loyalists who want to continue with the old feuds and the old ways of making money. There is, too, a mad plot to kill the Queen at the opening of Parliament thrown in for good measure.
One wonders whom the target audience for a novel such as this might be. There are no subtleties on offer here: the good guys are good, or goodish, and the bad guys are very bad indeed. No character is given any real motivation for the decisions they have made in the past and make in the present; there is no sense of a wider world of ideology or politics, and certainly there is no historical context. Jimmy, for instance, suffers a kind of amnesia as to why all the trouble and the violence began in the first place. Mick Quinn, his republican nemesis, has had an arm blown off and has acquired a cartoon-like hook as a replacement, and a rabid hatred of the "Brits", equally cartoonish, to match. Also in the mix is a "love across the barricades" sub-plot, which causes old, intransigent allegiances on all sides to be confronted, challenged and broken down. In the end, everybody just gets along.
A writer's choice of genre can say much about how a society imagines itself. A thriller like this, complete with the suspense, the chase, the thrills and the spills, which is satisfyingly worked out by the close, perhaps fulfils a deep act of wishful thinking on the part of both the author and the reader. Would that the real world of chaos and conflict could be experienced in moralistically simple black and white terms, and that old murderous enmities could evaporate so easily.
One imagines, though, that the reality in this case is much more strange and much more complex than this particular fiction, written to explain it.
Derek Hand is currently writing A History of the Irish Novel for Cambridge University Press. He was awarded a research fellowship 2005-2006 from St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, where he teaches in the English department
Line of Flight By John McAllister Bluechrome Press, 292pp. £9.99