At last Northern Ireland has its own fictional heroes-but, like the Province's weather, they leave a lot to be desired.
Steve Donaldson, an amiable, if politically incorrect, twentysomething wine merchant from Belfast, is rather disconcerted when an embarrassing incident involving last night's curry leads to he and his friends being kicked out of Kilmainham Gaol, Ireland's shrine to the anti-British struggle. Not as disconcerted, however, as he is when it is subsequently destroyed in a terrorist firebombing and he discovers that they could be blamed for it. Desperate not to become a Protestant version of the Birmingham Six, Steve and his friends flee Dublin, aided by the glamorous and cunning Kirsty Lennox. Pursued by both loyalist and republican gunmen, their bid to escape takes them to an eccentric boarding-school in Shropshire, a rainswept dock in Kent and finally to the historic battlefields of Northern France. There they are forced to face their pursuers in a series of violent confrontations, as the terrorists suck them into a world of malevolence and brutality, and their increasing consumption of alcohol renders them less and less able to focus.
Arson About is a blackly comic novel in the school of Colin Bateman and Tom Sharpe. But with less rational characters.
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