Christopher Brookmyre: Be My Enemy

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Brookmyre's tough, anti-hero journo Jack Parlabane has proved a winner for this satirical thriller writer, who has just won his second Sherlock Award for best comic novel. Both winning novels — Boiling a Frog and Be My Enemy — feature the polemical Edinburghian as he uncovers the exponents of international terror and shady intelligence, and debates the many-headed question of Where We've Got To as a society.

Be My Enemy is extraordinarily current. It begins with a discussion of Al Qaeda ("Bin Laden? A **** charlatan," is the opener, spoken by a character whose point of view should not be underestimated as the ensuing plot unfolds) and moves quickly on to intelligence secrets, and murdering ideologues who make their victims' deaths look like suicide (which should get the conspiracy theorists going vis a vis the case of British scientist David Kelly).

As the plot develops we're treated to witty yet relentlessly polemical rants on a multitude of contemporary issues, from cellphone usage ("phone call as excretory function") to many pages of debate about Margaret Thatcher ("she cultivated division as a matter of policy") to the sad demise of our ability to quote luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, the younger generation instead merely having absolute recall for sitcom gags.

There is a plot — quite a good one, actually — but it gets lost in the page-after-page diatribes. Characters emerge almost solely through dialogue in defence of their political positions and, while it's lively, clever verbiage, it was all a bit much, a disconnected world of characters I didn't give a toss about.

The plot: Parlabane is invited on a week-long assignment in the Scottish countryside covering a bunch of executives on a corporate outward bound course run by Ultimate Motivational Leisure. Something's fishy: someone steals the participants' SIM cards, then the real army starts returning their paint bombs with bullets. No one seems to know any more what's real and what's not. But you can bet there'll be some real blood before the final edition runs off the printer.

* Little Brown, $37