The author of the well-reviewed Divorcing Jack returns with another side-splittingly funny, irreverent tale of violence in Northern Ireland. Miller, its antihero, is a smart-ass, hard-drinking bicycle-riding young journalist who gets banished from a busy Belfast daily (for being "over the top way out pissed as fuck stocious" drunk in the office) to a boring weekly in Crossmaheart, a rural terrorist hot spot. He's not immediately welcomed at the Chronicle, where his new colleagues bitterly inform him that it's "normal practice to wait until a body shows up before giving a man's job away." Jamie Milburn, Miller's predecessor at the Chronicle, has disappeared. Pursuing the mystery, Miller rides his bike, which he calls the "Cycle of Violence," falls in love with Jamie's gal, Marie, and investigates-and possibly precipitates-a real cycle of violence that hurtles to a fascinating, devastating finale. Bateman's forte is that, without directly addressing Northern Ireland's military/ paramilitary confrontation, the book is drenched and reeking with the pervasive violence and fear of a war-torn state. As the tale unfolds, lives splinter and explode as savagely as the bombs that rock Main Street. This horror is cleverly framed with the blinding sparkle of dark Northern Irish wit-humor so black that it will have readers chuckling even while it reveals the dreadful realities that laughter pretends to camouflage. We probably learn more about life in Northern Ireland from this brilliant, often hilarious novel than from a year of Sunday magazine specials. (May).
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Despite a cutesy title (the hero's eponymous bicycle), Bateman's second novel following Divorcing Jack (LJ 11/1/95) is a story of death by disease, terrorism, murder, abuse, and suicide, salted with gallows humor. The novel opens with the death of the father of a Northern Irish journalist named Miller. When his drunkenness results in a demotion to a newspaper in the Belfast suburb of Crossmaheart, Miller finds that his predecessor, Milburn, has disappeared. When he also finds that Milburn's sensuous but withholding girlfriend Marie was apparently a victim of gang rape as an adolescent, he becomes her instrument of revenge, either inadvertently or subconsciously. In Bateman's Northern Ireland, violent death and personal corruption blow in the wind like the acrid odor of spilt beer, while many people simply try to find a bit of clean air to breathe. Miller's extraordinary aptitude for personal survival and Bateman's witty dialog turn this relentless, dark vision into a beacon of redemption.-Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York
Exiled to darkest Crossmaheart after a spectacular drunk, Miller, a Belfast reporter who has his own weekly column but keeps his first name secret, falls in with waitress Marie Young, falls in love with her, falls into her bed. But chastely, since Marie's still traumatized from her childhood rape by three young bloods who've long since paid for the crime and been forgotten. Miller, not the most patient or disinterested sexual therapist in the world, finds his job horrendously complicated by the fate of Marie's last lover, Jamie Milburn, his predecessor on the Crossmaheart Chronicle. Jamie hasn't been seen lately, unless you count his head, glimpsed in a fox's mouth. This last discovery is all too much for Marie, who goes off her medication and takes a powder instead. Miller, with nothing better to do, tracks down her three assaulters and has brief, informal exchanges with each of them—exchanges that the police get very interested in when all three turn up dead. Dogged by his reputation as the Angel of Death, Miller keeps digging into the case, as if anything he could do would make a difference to Marie, until he finally digs too deep.
Less manic—except for its luckless heroine—than Bateman's blackly comic debut, Divorcing Jack (1995). But Bateman and his hero both pay a high price for the few sweet, funny moments they wring out of this vale of tears.
