Bridging the election of the coalition government and set against an east London backdrop of local crime, the Olympics and the associated yuppification of the area, Roland Muldoon’s novel is a page-turner grounded in reality. This is not a novel about the removal and destruction of working class communities, though – there are only passing references to the implantation of the cushioned middle class into areas such as Broadway Market – but a crime thriller.
A white van parked in Romford is found to contain papers, transcripts and tapes. Together they reveal a story of cops (some in the lowest echelons with all the problems of insane shifts and attacks on their pay and pensions) and robbers. The story features ‘undercover Home Office-sanctioned cops’, an old East End ‘firm’, ‘royalty, drugs, police protection of institutionalised crime, murders and murderers, corruption, and the old establishment practice of being beyond the law, protecting their class interests as they felt the need to do’.
Written in breathtaking staccato style, the plot is centred on two undercover coppers who are monitoring Bob Crow. The story reveals how the British state has been involved in murders and rendition. While not developing a major political thesis, it contains sufficient hints, references and pointers to the author’s sympathies and experiences. The role of the state in Northern Ireland, the setting up of stories of Jamaican gangsters flooding London with coke, the infiltration of leftist groups and the involvement of the extreme right are all in the melange. And you keep reading to unravel it all.
But within this fiction is a truthful commentary on the way the state permits its ‘servants’ to operate outside the law. It is not only current events such as the embarrassing papers found in Tripoli linking MI6 and the rendition of Libyans. The state has a long history of paying informers and maintaining connections with people who are criminals but are thought to be useful.
Contradictory Dickens On the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth, Terry Eagleton looks at the contradictions of the man and his work
Tweetin’ ’bout a revolution: Paul Mason interview Newsnight’s Paul Mason, author of a new book on the revolts sweeping the world, speaks to Red Pepper
Catch 22: war satire still bites in the age of Fallujah and Helmand Catch 22, by Joseph Heller, reviewed by Matt Owen
Radical cities: A guide to Nablus, Palestine Simply visiting Palestine can be a radical act. Sarah Irving suggests that the city of Nablus should be on any visitor’s itinerary
The students’ moment Student activist Michael Chessum reflects on the state of the fight against the Tories’ education reforms
Greece: how to avoid a social default Panagiotis Sotiris argues that stopping the debt repayments is the only way to avoid the devastation of Greece
Cycle city Kathmandu Jennie O’Hara meets Nepali campaigners seeking to tackle pollution and inequality by transforming their capital into a cycle-friendly city
An ‘excess of democracy’: what two generations of radicals can learn from each other Hilary Wainwright examines the possibility of forging a new kind of political economy by learning from the best of both today's radical movements and those of the 60s and 70s
Red Pepper is a magazine of political rebellion and dissent, influenced by socialism, feminism and green politics. more »
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