Bombproof

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 17, 2008

Seamus Bradley

BOMBPROOF

Michael Robotham

Sphere, free with the purchase of any of 50 titles in the Books Alive 2008 catalogue. Available until August 31.

Can an English crime thriller written in the American style by an Australian help boost literacy? Seamus Bradley finds out.

Abomb rips through a train on the London Underground. Many are dead and many more wounded. The city is locked down and Sami Macbeth - a gormless, half-Scottish, half-Algerian, newly released jailbird covered in debris - is on the run.

Macbeth is carrying a black backpack and is doing everything he can to avoid the police. The image is spookily similar to the 2005 London bombings. As the dragnet closes, readers are left wondering whether Macbeth will escape and how he could possibly be any kind of hero, given that he is clearly guilty of something horrendous.

Cue action-filled flashback.

Macbeth's other mission, as part of the Australian Art Council's 2008 Books Alive program, is to help flog 50 other titles, including books that would sell almost as many copies without government aid.

Why, for instance, would the latest, massive-selling Harry Potter need taxpayer support in the form of a free copy of Bombproof with every purchase? And many other titles wouldn't benefit much from the offer, either: Tim Winton's Breath already has a following, as does Helen Garner's The Spare Room. Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, would need no help, and Ian Rankin thrillers are already popular. Most of the chick lit, literary fiction, war stories, real-life and sport books on the list would do fine without a boost from Robotham's book.

For his part, Australian journalist turned celebrity ghostwriter turned novelist Robotham is a curious crime writer. He claims to have read few crime novels. One each from Rankin, John Connolly, Patricia Cornwell, John Grisham and so on.

Though set in England, Bombproof has much more in common with gritty American thrillers than the usual English fare. Robotham's writing has a pinch of Harlan Coben, evident in some of the witty one-liners and the sudden appearance of no-nonsense support characters at crucial times.

And, as in the US style, Bombproof has plenty of guns and goons but, though firmly set in England, there are no shotguns above the mantel. Indeed, there are no genteel drawing rooms, country houses nor bumbling vicars.

Instead, we go inside Sami Macbeth's universe, which is brutal and empty. Both his parents are dead and Macbeth has just been released from prison, having done more than two years for a crime he didn't commit. His determination to go straight is undermined by the abrupt disappearance of his 18-year-old sister and the equally sudden appearance of a bunch of toughs with IRA connections, high explosives and sociopathic tendencies.

Cue two bombs, a chase, a siege, some sexy sex, more deaths and an upbeat resolution the reader knew was coming from page one.

Robotham uses the full range of thriller-writer tricks to get us there. Impossible situations. Sharp sentences built on the solid subject-verb principle. Bad characters that are either two-dimensional or stereotypes. And, as the action mounts, sentences that get shorter. Sometimes down to just one word.

Much of the action is cartoon violence. Our anti-hero is whacked over the head with a baseball bat and shows no ill effects just two pages later. The hard-boiled characters engage in the usual Olympian linguistic gymnastics.

Robotham brings all the elements together believably and all the fighting, running and shooting is leavened with surprisingly well-turned humour, such as: "You're my man on the inside," says boss goon. Yeah, right, thinks the inside man. Just like a fish in a whale.

He even slips in a couple of nods to his Australian roots. John Howard's old gag about Lazarus with a triple bypass gets another outing, for instance.

Robotham has put plenty in there to keep the Books Alive buyers happy. So a young Harry Potter fan might, by getting Bombproof for free, learn to love the crime genre. Or a reader of serious literature might find, as the poet W.B. Yeats did with Agatha Christie novels, there is plenty to intrigue, engage and entertain in a good mystery or thriller.

And Robotham knows how to write a good one.

Seamus Bradley is The Sunday Age's associate editor.

© 2008 The Sunday Age

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