David Harsent wrote four episodes of Midsomer Murders and there's no reason why Sean O'Brien isn't equally up to the job on the evidence of this, his second novel. Here is a version of England, a private school in the provinces, with its history and traditions and a cast of malevolent characters and their motive for murder.
There is a by-election going on with a candidate from the emerging fascist party, it is 1968, and the school is holding a mock election. The narrator is an old boy returned as a teacher into the institution, increasingly drawn into sins of the past re-emerging into the present and , like Hamlet, finding the sinister events revealed to him beyond his capacity to deal with. Anti-semitism is second nature to the institution and is a part of not only its cadets but also its minor literary figure and local bookshop. Stephen Maxwell is not only in a position of responsibility, being called upon to oversee the school's star - Jewish- Oxbridge candidate, but has an ex-girlfriend on a downward spiral and an affair with the headmaster's wife to make it no easier for him.
What O'Brien does best is describe character, either sympathetically or with his poet's accuracy in portraying the malign or raffish,
Maggie was beautiful in an autumnal way, her beauty on the edge of inevitable dissolution. It seemed to be the pathos that provoked the desire.
The tension rises and routine right-wing violence doesn't take much provoking as the novel is paced towards a climax in which the body count rises before Maxwell's account looks back with the benefit of hindsight on what we know is really ongoing and unfinished business.
There is much to enjoy in the writing, if you enjoy admiring it, because it is not for the faint-hearted, bringing to mind the seedy world of Patrick Hamilton and I can think of no comparison that represents higher praise than that. The atmosphere of history weighing heavily upon England transfers readily across from O'Brien's poetry and if the Sunday Times reviewer thought that it was strong enough to overcome an unlikely or contrived ending, I only reflect that mundane stories don't get written down and that fiction is inevitably made of remarkable things.
O'Brien is still likely to be regarded as a poet even though his output includes plays, translations, commentary and other fiction but he is a writer to be respected in whatever genre he takes on and this, like all his work, is a record of our times as powerful, and sometimes didactic, as any who have made a contribution.
