Colin Bateman: Mohammed Maguire

By MARK BROATCH

The likely headline screams out at you as Colin Bateman sets the scene for his latest satire. "Triple attempted suicide at Christmas: Santa, toy store boss and terrorists' child out on ledge."

The sharp shock of the headline is appropriate given that the Northern Irishman was for many years deputy editor of the County Down Spectator and wrote a weekly satirical column for it (he has claimed to be the only journalist to have been sued for libel by the Boys' Brigade).

Bateman the satirist and newsman are never too far from the novelist.

The title of Bateman's latest novel should give away some of his targets in this most recent volley.

Mohammed Maguire, the 10-year-old son of an IRA terrorist and Egyptian militant, is left an orphan after both his parents are shot in an attack by United States Marines in helicopter gunships.

After some thoroughly unpleasant scenes involving Bedouin nomads who rescue him, he is brought back to Ireland, where image-manipulators from every crawl, sorry, walk of life take advantage of him.

Being There-like, he becomes an inadvertent leader, this time of rebellion.

It's at times amusing, affecting and frustrating. Frustration comes mainly because Bateman's a bit too ready to sacrifice plot and believability for a joke, too quick to digress into a childish aside.

You can hear the conversation: "But I want to write, 'The men sat down either side of the desk, separated by an Apple PowerBook, a yellow legal notebook and two red felt-tipped pens. They looked at each other for a few moments. The men, not the red felt-tipped pens'."

"No, Colin, the readers will think your 8-year-old son is writing it instead of a 40-year-old ex-journo."

On the other hand, sometimes you can't help but smile.

He has written elsewhere: "She despised him as the philandering bastard who'd ruined her life. Later, when she'd calmed down, she was angry at herself. She apologised to the nurses. She bought them a box of Milk Tray and they sat through the night with her, wary yet, but gradually warming to her, although not enough to eat the black cherry."

At other times, you wonder how he has managed to avoid knee surgery for so long, so relentlessly in his books does he mock, sometimes loudly and sometimes with satire lite ("Sinn Fein, the political-yeah-sure wing of the Provisional IRA"), both sides of that lovingly soft-soaped euphemism, "the Troubles".

This is a prolific, cinematic-style writer who is cavalier with his main characters, happy to kill off even main ones.

He has, in fact, killed Bill Oddie from The Goodies (or at least someone who might be Bill Oddie) in one of his books, or, here, included a very odd intimate moment in a prison bed between little Mo and a female British PM called Tin Knickers.

His usual antagonistic protagonist, Dan Starkey, doesn't make an appearance here. Fans will know and, um, love, the relentless drinker and womaniser who in one novel sleeps with the mother of a girl who just may be the new Messiah. Lovable rogue comes to mind, though other words may come to other minds.

Mohammed Maguire is, given these authorial caveats, very funny at times, easy to read, but it's not Bateman at the top of his game.

Perhaps he's just been a little too busy in the past couple of years. Perhaps, given that it's the third novel in recent years to do so, he's too preoccupied with skewering the film-making industry (Hollywood wants Mo to sell his story).

Perhaps it's because Bateman's last screenwriting effort, Wild about Harry, attracted relentlessly indifferent reviews (his prose style is well-suited to film adaptations).

Perhaps it's another misguided attempt to crack the American market.

Perhaps, though, it's just because he likes taking the piss.

HarperCollins

$31.99

* Mark Broatch is an Auckland reviewer.