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Amazon.co.uk Review
How, perhaps, could it not be? His novel plunges into the very heart of the darkest days of Thatcherism. Inhabiting, in prose, so gaunt in places it feels as though it could easily have been lifted from surveillance reports, a political epoch when fear about an imminent nuclear apocalypse led to "99 Red Balloons" topping the charts and Mrs Thatcher declared open season on the striking miners, branding them the enemy within.
The nefariousness of the government's overt and covert campaigns against the miners is tapped a la James Ellroy for their full dramatic effect. In Stephen "The Jew" Sweet, a strike-bashing arch-media manipulator and his driver-cum-henchmen Neil Fontaine with his neo-Nazi hirelings, Peace represents the insidious practices of a state hell bent on crushing the dispute. While his portrayal of a hubristic Scargill and an NUM executive, beset by incompetence, corruption, bureaucracy and petty rivalries, depicts a union management hopelessly outflanked by comparison. The ordinary miners (whose plights are voiced by Peace in a couple of running narratives in Yorkshire dialect) are left to face the grind of the strike. Their desperation and, not unjustified paranoia, neatly illustrated by one striker's belief that Band Aid has been contrived to wrestle donations from the miners' charitable fund. --Travis Elborough
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That said, this novel is far from being a disappointment. In some ways, the Miner’s Strike and it’s various political and contributory sub-strata is perfect subject matter for Peace. Well structured, informative and still topical 20 years after the events it describes, Peace doesn't really put a foot wrong. As someone raised by Tories and who was 8 years old at the time, it certainly made me consider the media portrayal of events that I’ve not thought about for years. Best digested in as few as sittings as possible so as to keep track of the various minions of various trade unions, it has enough ‘secret’ (or ‘occult’, as Peace would have it) history and factual verisimilitude to work on both the intended levels. Occasionally, it’s downright thrilling, if never quite audacious enough to make you drop the book in disbelief at what you’re reading. One just can't help feeling that, while more relevant to UK readers, the subject-matter isn't as epoch-defining as the Bay of Pigs and assassination of JFK, and Arthur Scargill will never have the dark charisma and Wodehousian gift for the acerbic comment that Ellroy ascribes to J. Edgar Hoover.
Again, watching with curiosity to see what subject he moves to next.
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