Ronan Bennett

I am listening to the radio, only half awake. Some hammy old actor is camping it up in one of those overblown plays about the ‘Troubles’. In tones of high theatricality he sets the sinister scene: the Falls Road, Belfast, just after midnight; one of the most dangerous corners in Europe if you happen to be unaccompanied and of the wrong religion. I assume it’s an adaptation of some Gerald Seymour novel and reach over to turn the radio off. Then I recognise the voice – it’s John Humphrys on Today. I concentrate. On the Falls, apparently, men with hard, cold eyes used to stare sullenly from behind the iron railings that surround the pubs and clubs, planning their next operation.’

We know all about Republican violence, about its worst excesses; in Britain, some people, maybe even most, know what the initials IRA stand for. I wonder how many could name the principal Loyalist organisations, still less distinguish between them. You could say that there has been little reason for the average Londoner to get acquainted with the world of Loyalist terror: the UFF do not bomb the City, the UVF don’t shoot policemen. Loyalist paramilitaries now claim more victims than the IRA, but they confine their murdering to Catholics – in Northern Ireland. So while we rightly remember the two boys murdered at Warrington, we conveniently forget the five Catholic workmen killed in County Derry after the two boys died.’

Love story and murder mystery, The Blue Afternoon is full of puzzles. First: why ‘blue’ afternoon? It’s not just the afternoon, there are so many spots of blue throughout the novel it becomes a cyan wash. In the first few pages we are told that the sign outside the house designed by K.L. Fisher, architect, is small and blue; in her room there is a ‘blue and yellow Gertrud Arndt rug’; she gets a powerful urge to swim in the ‘overchlorinated blue’ of her building’s pool, where a woman sunbathes ‘in a cobalt two-piece’; and, at the end of the book, we learn that Fischer ‘loved too, once; my blue baby, Coleman’. Blue is there in all its hues: sky blue, baby blue, washed-out blue, cobalt, violet … we can hardly doubt that something meaningful is intended. But what?…