The Rescue Man, by Anthony Quinn
The Other Side of the Stars, by Clemency Burton-Hill
When journalists venture into no man’s land and begin writing fiction, they do so in the knowledge that it could all get a bit messy. It’s not long before the sound of grinding axes start up. So it’s a pleasant surprise to find two hacks emerging from the fray relatively unscathed. With The Rescue Man, Anthony Quinn, the Independent’s film critic, has taken Liverpool’s blitz during the second world war as the backdrop to a unusual tale of betrayal and obsession. In a city where faith and alcohol ferment on the waterfront, historian Tom Baines is a man with a more idiosyncratic passion: architecture. As the Luftwaffe pursues its whistle-stop tour of the skyline, Tom finds ‘his mind’s eye clouded with ashes and rubble’. So he joins the Heavy Rescue team, pulling survivors out of the wreckage. An affair with a photographer’s wife and an obsession with the diaries of a Victorian architect slowly divert his attention from the mayhem. It soon becomes apparent that this is a novel interested in the façades of human nature as much as stonemasonry.
At times Baines and his beloved landscape almost merge through their shared trauma. ‘The city was still holding its breath as spring lurched into summer,’ notes Baines. ‘Anxiety had become his companion. It woke in the morning in front of the blackout curtains, hovered by the wireless, read the newspaper over his shoulder.’ Understandably, Quinn has a cinematic eye for narrative scope. In particular, the collaborations of Graham Greene and Carol Reed are invoked (even the name Baines is borrowed from The Fallen Idol).
Like all good debut novels this book tells us something new.
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