A story that doesn’t clearly lay everything out neatly for the reader. We know from the title, and from a few brief references in the text that we are following a young Irishman planning a bomb attack on Camden Town tube station at some point in the 1980s. Chris Power, reviewing the parent collection for the Guardian, compared it unfavourably with William Trevor, as “Steven’s motives remain unexplored.”
Much as I hesitate to disagree with such a knowledgeable commentator, for me that is actually a strength of this as storytelling. Barry’s use of close third person POV gives us a slight distance from his protagonist, but we are in Steven’s world, seeing it his way. Taking his minder’s admonishment to not get “emotional” about his task, he is as focused on his new German girlfriend and their possible life together (rather romantically imagined in Steven’s head) as on his mission. The horror of the scenario is not ignored -contemplating his potential victims, we see Steven think “They were his own kind, and if that was proof of cold valour, what was?” – but neither is it laid on with a melodramatic trowel. There is suspense: to borrow Hitchcock’s definition, we literally see the bomb being left under the market bookstall, although the story has finished before it is scheduled to go off. We see no explosion or human carnage: we are not in Jed Mercurio territory here.
The shock is not so explicit. It may be a perverse and twisted place to us, but we are in Steven’s ‘normal’ here. It is our error to assume that it follows the same logic and framework as ours – we will, I hope, not be bombing the people we danced alongside last night – and the withholding of a clear explanation makes the story all the more chilling. Answering the question ‘how has this young man come to be this way?’ is complicated, especially if we stand back (in time as much as geography) to contemplate responsibility.
Published in Dark Lies the Island, Jonathan Cape, 2012
A Personal Anthology 