Storytelling is part of the human condition. So I wrote a book

Chances are, if you’re a Reaction reader, you’ve always wanted to write a book. Most people do and I know I always have. Storytelling is part of the human condition. The pre-literate warmed by saga and flame, the cursor-flashing baffled in the spare room. It’s a universal desire often thwarted by universal demands. Time, family, mortgage and, oh, what to write.

And, like the bar room bully, I’ve been threatening it for years without ever quite backing it up. Well, mister, time to either do something or just stand there and bleed. And, put to it, I gone done. 

The upshot is Bang Out Of Order. That, I hasten to add, is its title and not a judgement on the quality of the book. 

For a synopsis, I’m going to quote the publishers because, frankly, who am I to argue with the professionals?

“In 1979, a desperate Irish republican detonated a bomb on a London train, killing dozens and causing irreparable damage. Years later, with the culprit never discovered, ageing cop Sean Christopher reopens the case, noticing a direct link to his past. As he begins to piece together the evidence from maturing Londoners burdened by their knowledge for far too long, romance begins to blossom with him and a young, witty colleague. Both a tense, quietly desperate crime procedural, and a meditation on time, generational differences, and family trauma, this immensely confident debut by journalist Patrick Barrow is a must-read.” 

So much for the what, how about the why?

I’ve always had a fascination for London, the city I grew up in. It has changed greatly over the years. It was, once, low-rise, four-star stained, gap-toothed and post-war. A city that traded on what it had been more than what it wanted to be. Largely because, like the country as a whole, it didn’t really know itself. 

It had had, at the furthest outer reaches of my memory, a brief moment of cool, “swinging like a pendulum do” and forming the backdrop to films like Alfie with Michael Caine and Up the Junction starring Dennis Waterman, later of The Sweeney. A last hurrah, really, of the London white working class and its particular culture of London pride. So much so that Battersea even served as the northern backdrop to Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

But its long moment of transformation came in the late Seventies, firstly in the beginnings of the dockside property boom when great stretches of London’s abandoned warehouses and moorings started to attract the eye of developers. By 1980, the film The Long Good Friday was already alluding to some of the forces behind it. 

The Brinks Mat robbery of 1983 was life imitating art, chunks its vast haul being laundered through Thameside development. By 1986, Big Bang had transformed the City and its overspill was Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, in which the old East End went vertical.

The City and finance were the second engine of the great change. The Square Mile had, in one form or another, always been there but globalising its markets, the expansion of derivatives trading and the Eighties cult of money-making sent it stratospheric. 

Living where I did in south east London, it happened literally under my nose. From Greenwich Park, you could look down on the buildings going up. By the time it was done, they looked down on you. A looming presence in every sense.

Everything changed. Everything. For good and for ill. Few shifts are unalloyed. I’m not sure I like the old place so much anymore. Its face is more beautiful but its soul – and I don’t romanticise the old one by any means – is one of a characterless, corporate city-state, right down to a citizens and helots divide. 

But against that backdrop – and the book’s narrative is split between then and a dateless present – the more timeless human dramas continue to operate. The things over which we have no control. Childhoods. Lonely and only. Or tumultuous and cruel. The mixed fortunes of ageing. The people we fall in love with or lives changed by a single moment of pure and catastrophic chance. Sometimes, as with at least one character, the two are the same.

You don’t make your own luck, you know. The Fates are ever at play and their instrument in the central moment of Bang Out of Order is the IRA. Like the gleaming towers of finance, they were a looming presence in London from the Balcombe Street Gang of the Seventies to the bombings at South Quay on the Isle of Dogs, Bishopsgate and the Baltic Exchange in the City by the Nineties. 

Things moved from the comic or inspiring – kids started phoning in bomb warnings to escape exams and London took pride in its blitz “we can take it” ability to carry on regardless – to the simply horrifying. Machine gun attacks on restaurants, detonations in pubs, mortar bombs on Downing Street. 

The transport system didn’t escape either and it is a fictional train bomb at London Bridge station around which all action revolves. Unmitigated, long-lasting devastation. For those who lived. For those who died. For those who weren’t even there.

In their later manifestations, IRA attacks originated with the Ultras of South Armagh. “Bandit Country” as Home Secretary Merlyn Rees dubbed it. Snipers, soldiers and the SAS. Having had an Armagh grandmother and been schooled among second and third-generation Irish kids, the temptation to connect the two in the plot was irresistible.

Unlike London’s remorseless advance into the future, Northern Ireland, for all its efforts not to, carries its past heavily. Its everyday folk are unfailingly courteous and welcoming. Warrenpoint may seem now like a genteel lough-side town. Bessbrook Mill doesn’t rock to the roll of helicopter rotors. But the police stations are still fortified and a laval flow still runs hot under the surface of Crossmaglen, Newry or the border bocage. To visit is to be constantly aware of the dragon’s breath of yesterday. 

Neurosis, they say, is an unhealthy attachment to the past and, to cure his, the hero, Sean Christopher must venture into it. (I needed a name with sufficient Anglo-Irish tang but didn’t want a Prayer for The Dyingformula. Discovering they’re hard to avoid, I borrowed two of my own.) 

He’s a man increasingly at odds with the times he lives in. Despite his daily acquaintance with London, he hardly recognises it. He shakes his head at newspapers that are no longer newspapers. Doesn’t understand ubiquitous beards. He is baffled by the easy tears of man-children and finds his own, old-fashioned brand of almost Western-style masculinity both a fortress and a burden. He talks slow and acts quick. But by night the shadows close. He is a damaged man.

Ultimately though, his is a quest, as all stories have been from Beowulf to Bond, that demands he venture into the heart of the beast and confront it there. And he will need, as such quests do, as we all do, a maiden helper to succeed. Sex and violence. Driving human behaviour and story-telling narrative since the Iliad. Not much changes, you know, and their emergence via the writer’s hand is as much via the alchemy of deep-seated psychology as considered creativity. And let’s be honest, we all love a bit of it in a book. 

Bang Out Of Order is, I hope, a rattling good read. Taut and tight. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed conjuring it from the imagination and things distantly remembered. I hope you thoroughly enjoy reading it. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life