Fiction: Bloodland

As published in Irish America Magazine, Review of Books
April / May 2012  p. 94

In a genre that may seem to have exhausted all possible plot-lines, Alan Glynn’s new thriller, Bloodland, is refreshingly unpredictable. An out of work journalist researching a dead socialite, an American senator attacked in the Congo, a drunk former-Taoiseach, and an Irish real estate developer with a chronic tension headache are the seemingly unrelated players this Dublin-born author weaves together in his fourth novel – a conspiracy theory about corrupt business practices and international oligarchy.

Part of this unpredictability comes from the fragmented nature in which the events are presented to the reader. Focus continually alternates between the four main characters, and though these changes in perspective are indicated simply by an extra space between paragraphs, the words, “Cut To,” would not feel entirely out of place. Glynn’s first novel, The Dark Fields, came to movie theaters last March under the title Limitless, and narrated as it is – in the present tense with abrupt, conversational language – the teased out Bloodland often reads like a screenplay, or an ambitious television pilot.

Certainly, the story is timely. The financial crisis, the pervasiveness of the Internet, and the military industrial complex are all key elements. Drugs, too (the legal kind this time) are a powerful influence. Characters in search of answers are slaves to coffee’s stimulation, while those attempting to keep secrets buried seek comfort in whiskey’s depressant effects. In keeping with genre tradition, women are incidental at best – showing up to service the plot, and occasionally, the men. But in a world so unnervingly like the one portrayed in this paranoid novel, such cliches may remain one of the few consistencies on which we can continually rely.

($16.00 / Picador / 375 pages)