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While on jury duty in Belfast, a successful married surgeon, James Fechner, finds himself oddly drawn to the defendant, Rusting, on trial for the murder of his father, a notorious Loyalist thug. When Fechner spies Rusting in a pub a year or so later, following his acquittal, Fechner is compelled to strike up a friendship with him. An inarticulate need deep within him is somehow answered by proximity to Rusting’s ambiguous violent orbit. Harrison keeps twisting our perspective on what follows in ways that allow multiple insights into the strange psychological impact of the Troubles on a generation of Belfast men. A couple of years ago, concern was raised that modern masculinity had become a marginalised subject in contemporary fiction. This superb novel shows us what we’ve been missing.
