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Adam Colclough (3 KP) rated Harry's Game in Books

Mar 6, 2018  
HG
Harry's Game
Gerald Seymour | 2015 | Thriller
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
A chillingly believable thriller about the 'troubles'. (0 more)
Dangerous Games
London at the height of the IRA’s campaign on the British mainland and a government minister is assassinated, orders are send down from the highest level that retaliatory action must be taken. Gerald Seymour’s ground breaking 1975 novel tells the story of the resulting operation, in which a British agent is sent undercover in Republican Belfast.

For the most part thrillers are the literary equivalent of Danish pastry, enjoyable but not made to last. A few, and ‘Harry’s Game’ is one, are more substantial fare, food for the mind that may give you indigestion.

On one level it is a book in the tradition established by Frederick Forsythe, fiction played out as fact allowing the author to draw on his journalistic background. Seymour goes beyond this by creating characters who aren’t simply stock heroes and villains. Instead they are human beings engaged in a struggle that is squalid and futile rather than heroic and purposeful.

This combines to give a grimly believable picture of daily life in Northern Ireland at a time when a single word or action out of place could have deadly consequences. He also writes well about the machinations behind the scenes on both sides, with the British political and military establishment struggling to fight an undeclared war they don’t understand; and the IRA high command masking the brutality of their actions behind misty eyed romanticism.

Brutal, believable and still relevant more than forty years after it was first published this is a novel that is very much worth reading, even if doing so can be unsettling.