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THE DOLL PRINCESS
by Tom Benn
Jonathan Cape, January 2012
304 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 0224093509


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

THE DOLL PRINCESS is set in Manchester in July 1996, a month after the IRA planted explosives in the city centre that became the largest peace-time bomb ever exploded in Britain. The Evening News carries reports of two murders. A front page story about a glamorous Egyptian woman, heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body was found in the basement of a block of flats. The other, a short piece on the death of a local prostitute, a young woman, murdered and dumped by the side of the road.

It's obvious which story was expected to be of more interest to the paper's readers, but for Henry Bane it was the second one that had the greatest impact. He went to school with Alice Willows and she was the second girl he'd slept with, so although he hasn't seen her in ten years, Bane still takes her death personally, more so because hardly anyone else seems to be giving her death a second thought.

Bane is a man very definitely on the wrong side of the tracks. He's a small time villain working for one of Manchester's established gang bosses who does basic legwork when needed involving drugs, protection and whatever racket happens to be going down in his neighbourhood. But even Bane is unprepared for the level of violence that suddenly gets unleashed. Violence that seems to be dogging his heels at every turn. Bane is a hard man who knows his way around the city but even he's going to need to keep his wits about him to survive.

Benn chooses to tell Henry Bane's story in his own words and his own vernacular, which is a difficult trick to pull off, but he certainly succeeds. Bane's personality and distinctive voice suffuses the book like the words in a stick of Blackpool rock and I haven't read such a convincing look at the darker side of northern life since Jonathan Gash's Clare Burtonall series, although Bane is certainly no Bonn. The dialect-heavy dialogue and narrative won't find favour with all readers, but it is certainly authentic, both in speech pattern and word use, and was wholly recognizable to someone who grew up less than 40 miles away and well remembers the days surrounding the horror of the IRA's bombing campaign. There were times when I felt that better use could have been made of apostrophes to convey the local habit of clipping word endings but that's a hard call for any author, especially when the advice most usually given in this context is to avoid reliance on vernacular speech like the plague for fear of alienating the audience.

The pace was unrelenting and at times I felt I was being dragged around by Bane by the scruff of my neck. I devoured THE DOLL PRINCESS in two long sittings in one day, with barely a pause in between sessions. This is a raw, punchy book that will either be loved or hated, and I fall firmly into the first camp.

§ Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.

Reviewed by Linda Wilson, December 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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