High Dive

"I'm not going to sleep with you," she repeated.

"Sure," he said. "Right."

It had been a very exciting development. Here was a woman, a beautiful woman, a new woman who didn't know the ins and outs of his every mistake, and she was thinking about not sleeping with him.

High Dive by Jonathan Lee is a fictional account of the 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, which was targeted at Margaret Thatcher. It follows the lives of three people; Moose, the acting hotel manager, his daughter, Freya, working at the hotel through the summer as she decides what to do with her life, and Dan, a young IRA member finally given an important task.

This is the kind of novel I love - there's a clear sense of time and place, with the mid-eighties show more being especially well rendered, and the characters are complex and compelling. The framing device of the bombing is almost beside the point, although it does ratchet up the tension of the final chapters considerably. show less

It’s 1984 in Brighton, England and Margaret Thatcher plans to visit and stay at The Grand Hotel. Moose Finch, once a promising high diver, once a hopeful man, now deputy hotel manager of The Grand, sees this as his chance to shine and regain some of his lost glory. Freya Finch, his daughter, has gotten a reasonably high score on her A-levels at a mediocre school and is expected to go on to university. She has no plans to fulfill her father’s expectations, but prefers to spend her days behind the receptionist desk at The Grand, drawing penguins on the margins of the registration book, dreaming of trips to Madrid and stealing glances at fellow employee Surfer John. Dan is a somewhat reluctant IRA explosive expert, who wants to advance show more in the organization, but isn’t too keen on the idea of killing people (or dogs). Jonathan Lee has written a terrific book on aspirations, missed opportunities, and people caught in the middle. He’s taken a real-life event and made it more personal. show less

The time period 1978-1984 was a peak period of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, what locals call The Troubles. The IRA was branching out into England with bombing, trying to turn popular English opinion into pressure against politicians to leave Northern Ireland.

Dan is a young Catholic idealist who joins the IRA to avenge the death of his father. Over in Brighton, England, Freya has left school and despite stellar A-levels is not sold on going to university. Her father Moose, the deputy manager of a fancy hotel, failed to parlay his young athletic prowess as a diver into a degree, which he blames for both the failure of his marriage and his less-than-prestigious job. He's desperate to convince Freya not to make the same mistake, show more but in the meantime she spends her days working the reception desk for him.

These days Moose's attention is divided between worry for Freya's future and an upcoming event at the hotel that could finally earn him the promotion he craves to feel that his life has not been wasted. The Conservative Party will hold their annual conference at this hotel. Unsurprisingly, this attracts the attention of the IRA ...

This is one of those books where all the characters are sympathetic and likable, and as I read all I could think was that nothing was going to end well for any of them. The scenes at the hotel with Moose and his staff reminded me of Stewart O'Nan's [Last Night at the Lobster] in the way it offered a peek behind the curtain that most of us never see as guests. Like O'Nan, Lee portrays his somewhat hopeless characters with an empathy that draws the reader in.

On days when ambition and regret got the better of him, when lost opportunities stuck to his shoes like bubble gum gone to ground and created ugly slouching strings that halted progress, he told himself that all human life was here (at the hotel).

Over in Belfast, Lee applies the same empathetic filter to the lives of Dan and his compatriots.

There was the rising sense ... that Belfast's carnage stole not only the victims' lives but large parts of the witnesses too. You disintegrated into the recriminations, the headlines, the pictures. You scattered yourself into proofs, warnings, suspicions, arrests. You rode out into the dark outrage of others, saw human loss shaped toward political ends, and though you hoped for the occasional gleam of uncontaminated compassion it seemed that the world was dimming.

In the end, Lee detonates bombs both externally and internally in his characters, and none of them will ever be the same. Readers might feel the same way. show less

I picked this book up expecting a political thriller – what I got was something very different and perhaps more interesting. Though the Brighton bombing is at its heart, it is not a story of intrigue or suspense but a character-driven account of the lead-up to the Tory Party conference in Brighton, seen through the eyes of three fictional characters. Dan is an IRA member who is tasked with setting the bomb, Moose is the Grand Hotel’s deputy manager, hoping that Thatcher’s stay during the conference will lead to a longed-for promotion, and Freya, his teenage daughter, is working at the hotel after leaving school, waiting for her life to start.

The author delves deep into his characters, their longings, their regrets, their show more ambitions. There are subtle threads that run through all their stories. Dan and Moose are both committed but not uncritical members of institutions with rules and rituals and complex alliances. There’s a freshness to the prose and some striking observations of daily life, both dark and comic.

Telling the story through fictional characters builds the tension. We don’t know exactly what will happen to Dan, Moose and Freya, but we know about the bombing and its aftermath and that gives their stories added poignancy. We’re reminded that while we are musing on our purpose and our fears, trying to create our own narrative arc, the thing that we can’t control is coming, regardless.
*
I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley. show less

This is a well-written, character-driven novel. Yes, there's an assassination attempt but the bomb itself often feels tangential to the real story of people just trying to live their lives in a politically fraught time. (Not that that resonates at all these days.) Should make for fantastic discussion in this year's Tournament of Books.

Jonathan Lee's novel 'High Dive' delves into the minds of three main characters in 1984: Dan, a young man working for the Irish Republican Army, along with teenage Freya the receptionist and her dad Moose the deputy general manager, both working at the Grand Hotel in the lovely Brighton. Historically, a bomb in the Grand Hotel in 1984 actually went off, so you can guess where the book leads. Jonathan Lee is great at showing sympathy for all three characters but the favorite for me was the setting of Brighton, even though not much outside the hotel is explored. The bomb is left until the end, focusing on the before rather than the after. Maybe focusing a little too long, as I think I would have liked the book a bit shorter in length. The show more book doesn't need ALL of these pages in the minds of the characters, as immediately you like these characters. I like that this is a topic I haven't really explored. I'll look out for Jonathan Lee's books in the future. show less

I can't really think of anything I didn't like about this book, and yet it was just a 3 star for me. The characters were engaging and I felt like I really got to know them, and life in Brighton in the 1980's too. I like the author's writing style - it felt effortless to read but not at all fluffy, and I didn't mind that the bombing itself wasn't the central point of the novel. I think maybe it needed a little more narrative tension.