The Journeyman Tailor

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece!
Review: Captured the essence of the Catholic/Protestant conflict. The reader empathises with the Irish people but can still appreciate and applaud the actions taken by the British security forces. The use of a strong central female character in the initiation of an inexperienced male operative in this arena is at the heart of this book. Their interactions, and his own internal battle in justifying the cold, calculated acts committed in the name of God and country serve to introduce two unforgettable characters. The icing on the cake is the blending of history with the present in the introduction of, and frequent allusions to, a historical character who seems to come alive in another central character who is the protagonist of the "dynamic duo".

Rating:
Summary: Just a slip of a girl
Review: Gerald Seymour's novels have transported us to so many places festering with suppurating animosities: the Balkans, Afghanistan, Kurdish Iraq, Italy, the old U.S.S.R., Lebanon, South Africa. In THE JOURNEYMAN TAILOR, we're off to one of the most intractable of Gordian knots, Northern Ireland.

Jon Jo Donnelly, a legend in his own time, is an IRA assassin on undercover assignment in the heart of England with his sniper rifle and cache of explosives. Back in Donnelly's Ulster home town, Song Bird is a British Security Service (MI5) informant embedded in the IRA infrastructure. Gary "Bren" Brennard, a newbie to MI5, is rushed over in short order to Northern Ireland to help run Song Bird after his predecessor's cover is blown.

Jon Jo is killing at will in Britain's hinterland. The PM wants his head on a platter yesterday. MI5's plan is to lure Donnelly back to his farm and family, at which time he can be isolated by Song Bird for elimination by Her Majesty's forces.

The focus of this thriller isn't Jon Jo, Song Bird or Bren. Rather, it's young Cathy Parker, ruefully characterized as "a slip of a thing" by the Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, whose ears have been burned by Parker's no-compromise lecture on Song Bird's importance. Cathy is Bren's boss on the ground and the informer's recruiter and chief handler.

In Seymour's other novels that I've read, the primary protagonist's motives are revealed. In Parker's case, we learn little of her background other than she's the renegade daughter of affluent English parents. In the now, she's red-haired, 5 foot 4 inches tall, weighs 8 stone 3 pounds, obsessively driven by her job, idolized by her male peers, backed to the max by her superiors, and affectionately regarded by MI5's otherwise bitter rivals in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Special Air Services. An alpha female that draws males like moths to light. Will Bren's wings get singed?

Since Seymour doesn't repeat a main character in other novels, it's unlikely we're to meet Cathy again. A pity, since, to me at least, she's proved to be one of the author's most engaging creations. Parker aside, however, this riveting book continue's the author's tradition of giving the reader a (presumably) realistic insight into the minds and hearts of the ordinary people who fight the gritty conflicts in the grotty corners of the civilized world where there are no winners and losers - only survivors. This is good stuff - the best of the genre on pulp fiction shelves.

Rating:
Summary: Who Dares Wins as it really is.
Review: If you're into the real macoy of what it feels like to live undercover, where everything and anything you say and do may give you away, this is the book for you. Always sharply focussed and with enough suspense to stop you putting the book down before you've turned the last page. The only down side is the lack of a sequal!

Rating:
Summary: A factualy based , above-average thriller.
Review: Most books written about the IRA sacrifice any notion of relism to the agenda of the author-the IRA become dim-witted psychopaths stalked by noble and idealistic British agents- so it was a welcome relief to find this dark, factualy-based story set in one of the most intriguing areas of Ireland, East-Tyrone. The IRA Volunteers in the book are certainly violent,but they are also profoundly human, Seymour puts their frailties on display and paints them as victims of the conflict rather than its villains. In one revealing passage he describes the 100-year history of one IRA family and asks "where was escape? Escape was impossible." In contrast it's hard to be sympathetic with the young British agent who seems a vain, shallow careerist( In a droll scene in a later book we see that Brennard has become a pencil-pushing beaurocrat with MI6). The book's main flaw is its blind adherence to the conventions of the modern thriller, with plucky Brennard making the lucky shot against his adversary, a far more sympathetic IRA man. Also jarring is the fact that Seymour gives the impression of not having spent much time in Altmore, the setting for the novel. Physical descriptions are sparse and although Seymours' character descriptions are spot on, he has no idea of how people from Tyrone actually speak- he simply props the word "feckin'" in every second sentance and hopes for the best. The author might have benefitted from a little more time walking the roads of Altmore, like Brennard in the book he has tried to assimilate the nature of the place from the reading room in a library, like his character he fails.