Revisiting history

High Dive
Jonathan Lee
Random House
2016, pp 374, Rs 999

Terrorism may involve dramatic, unspeakable acts, but its logistics can be positively banal. In High Dive, the vibrantly cinematic new novel by Jonathan Lee, a 24-year-old Irish Republican Army volunteer named Dan checks in under a pseudonym at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, with the express intention of helping a colleague plant a bomb to kill Margaret Thatcher.

The receptionist, Freya, who readers will grow to love and root for — she’s waffling over going to college, flummoxed by boys — treats Dan with a desk clerk’s customary solicitousness, even a mild longing. Dan responds with indifferent efficiency. No, he does not need to see the room. Thanks, but he’ll pay for all 3 nights up front in cash. Ah, the room has a sea view, lovely, but does it have a desk?

Then he thaws a bit. Something like banter begins. Freya mentions that Prime Minister Thatcher will be coming to visit, and Dan fires up the charm, asking which room might be on reserve for so distinguished a guest. Freya declines to say.

“He nodded,” Lee writes. “His eyes politely died.”
Yet here’s the twist — and an example of the sort of phyllo-dough layering that makes High Dive so rich: We soon learn that this exchange, which leaves Freya bewildered and disappointed, has the same effect on Dan. “He wasn’t prepared,” Lee writes, “for the way that, looking at her skin unspoiled by makeup or injury, he’d sense within that receptionist girl not arrogance, not ignorance, not the hoped-for signs that she liked to serve the ruling elite.”

She is, instead, suffering, just as he is — from disappointment, abandonment, a sense of reduced economic horizons. And so is Freya’s father, Moose, the deputy general manager of the hotel.

Anyone who was alive in 1984 and reading the newspaper — or has made a cursory study of British history since — will recognise the broad outlines of High Dive. In September 1984, a member of the IRA named Patrick J Magee planted a long-delay time bomb in the bathroom of Room 629 of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Thatcher and her Cabinet were set to convene for their annual Conservative Party conference. It detonated more than 3 weeks later on October 12, killing five and injuring 30. Thatcher was awake and at work in her suite, but she was not injured.

There has always been a low hum of speculation that Magee had an accomplice. In High Dive, Lee, a British novelist now living in Brooklyn, has taken the liberty of scribbling him in.

It was an inspired idea. Rather than slavishly recreating the Brighton bombing in its every detail, Lee freestyles, creating a sympathetic ensemble both at the Grand Hotel and in the streets of Belfast — the book tacks back and forth between the two — all while making expert use of the dramatic tension inherent in waiting for a lethal explosion. His book reminds one of Alfred Hitchcock’s distinction between surprise and suspense: Surprise is when the audience has no clue that there’s a bomb beneath the table and it suddenly goes off; suspense, Hitchcock explained, is when “the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there.”

We saw Dan put it there. It’s suspense that pulls us in. We make so many complex emotional investments in the lives of Lee’s characters, including Dan, that it takes a monk’s restraint not to flip to the very end of the book before you get there.

And yet the novel is at times quite droll. When Moose gets a visit from his mother, a drawer of tiny knives, he steels himself: “In her old age she was a great dispenser of tips and wisdom, around 5% of it excellent.”

There’s great range and compassion and high-definition imagery in Lee’s writing. One of the IRA grunts has a “lavishly ugly cauliflower ear”; another, a “face like a dose of hemorrhoids.” He does flirtation very well. And the spiteful chatter of marital deterioration.

Lee has also clearly studied the hospitality industry, and the details he offers about hotel back-office culture are great fun. (On the list of “Top Five Lies Today” compiled at the Grand Hotel registration desk: Madam, I’m so sorry. If there was any way to upgrade you, I would.)

He has studied the details of the Brighton bombing, too, though I will not say how it plays out for his characters. I will only say that the few pages preceding it are, to me, almost as devastating as the devastation itself. Moose never gets to speak to Thatcher, despite his many fantasies about doing so. He spots his moment. He tries. Then “a Special Branch guy barged him into the shadows.” She was gone.