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Pray for Us Sinners

by Patrick Taylor

When – or if – this no-nonsense techno-thriller is made into a movie, it will feature action and more action: uniformed men pouring out of military vans; gunfire; sirens; casualties of war; pin-drop suspense sequences involving detonators and wire clippers. There will also be one or two American actors struggling with the sound and the look of flinty Ulster boyos of the mid-1970s, for this is a book about The Troubles – its backdrop is British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s visit to Northern Ireland in 1974.

In time-honoured espionage fashion, the book starts with a hero and an undercover mission: young Lieutenant Marcus Richardson is a bomb disposal expert assigned to the Royal Army, who is given a new identity and a directive to infiltrate the Provisional IRA. Armed with civilian gear (laddish haircut, flared trousers) and a back story – a decade spent in the Alberta oilfields – Richardson finds a grotty bedsit in the Falls, a Republican stronghold in Belfast. With our agent in place, the other plot elements of the genre come thick and fast: the traitors on both sides, the girlfriend who complicates things, the race against the clock, and the Smiley-esque sleaze and incompetence from government higher-ups.

Altogether, Pray for Us Sinners is an absorbing, well-paced tub-thumper, with satisfying echoes of The Bridge on the River Kwai (as in the Lean film, the climax centres on the fate of an all-important bridge).The characterization is on the flat side, and the book doesn’t pretend to be literary – not with a sex scene that includes the sentiment “reminding him of a painting he had seen of Lady Godiva.” But it is flawlessly researched, and in its own terse way nails the chips-and-guns-with-everything atmosphere of violence in mid-1970s Ulster.

 

Reviewer: Adair Brouwer

Publisher: Insomniac

DETAILS

Price: $19.99

Page Count: 248 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-895837-61-8

Released: June

Issue Date: 2000-6

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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