Quick! Read this before you have an allergic reaction to carrot cake! (I Predict a Riot - Colin Bateman)

Member Name: pmcds

Product:	I Predict a Riot - Colin Bateman
Date:	03/10/08 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent storytelling, characterisation and plot development. Hilarious!

Disadvantages: Abrupt ending

At Christmas, knowing I like reading but not wanting to just get me any old book from an author I was already familiar with, she had an educated search and chose two books: one was Peter Robinson's Gallows View, with his central character Inspector Alan Banks; the other was this one, Colin Bateman's I Predict A Riot. Gallows View I read promptly - it was a small book, and a bright white and yellow cover. I Predict A Riot took me until last week to start reading. It just sat there on the shelf for months looking at me, but not really appealing to me in terms of how it looked. The dark cover and rather cryptic 'Murder, extortion & carrot cake' message on the front, as well as a slightly humourous blurb had put me off. However, I found that once I had started, I couldn't put it down. It's a brilliant book.

At the off-set, I was confused. The blurb was all about how hard-nosed Belfast police Superintendent Jimmy 'Marsh' Mallow was going to bring down lifetime nemesis and crook Pink Harrison by pinning on him the murder of a disembodied kid, dragged out of the river one night. Yet the story starts off by telling us how Redmond the ornithologist is stuck in Colombia, and how a Primark security guard has a bad first date with a civil servant.

Right from the off, Bateman gives us dark humour, without dwelling on it. He tells it how it is, and actually gives us some believable stories, things that actually do happen in real life, but the key thing is that he makes them interesting, and they are so random and not related in the first instance that you feel he has done his careful plot development and that at some point everything will come together.

This is probably the reason that the book is over 650 pages long. It seems as if Bateman has had such fun writing it that he has forgotten it's a book and that at some point, he probably should stop to publish it. Otherwise, you can easily see the plot strains continuing without meeting and the book ending up being in the Guinness Book of Records for being the longest ever written.

The book has a number of different stories all set in the backdrop of a Belfast in the aftermath of a ceasefire where half of them think it's all over, and the other half are only to willing to start rioting and pillaging at the first sign of a valid reason for doing so. Civil servant Walter works for the Department of Education with his friend Mark, and together they tick boxes and enter boring survey details. Walter and Margaret, a Primark security guard hoping to break into the fashion world, meet through an online dating agency, and find thatg the course of true romance is rather bumpy, and filled with ex-husbands and estate agents (just read it, all will become clear). Meanwhile, the aforementioned Redmond has been arrested in Colombia for making bombs, causing friction back home in his native Belfast.

Then comes the basis for the blurb, the 'main plot' as it is supposed to be, with 'Marsh' Mallow trying to pin anything and everything on corrupt politician and councillor Pink Harrison. This plot strain is the premise for the main story, as it is billed as a crime comedy, but all it serves as is really another bizarre element to a very funny book. Mallow is a serious policeman, as is Margaret a stereotypical woman and Harrison and Walter unsurprising in their actions as men. What is clever is that Bateman lets us into their minds, and tells us what they are thinking. Quite often, a crime novel will go through the basics of someone's thought, but leaves out the comedy aspect as it doesn't fit in with the book. Bateman, by giving us this darkly funny side, provides us with an overly long book that could have gone on for hours and kept me happy.

The paragraphs are relatively short, keeping to 5 or 6 pages a chapter, sometimes longer. The characters' lives all end up converging with each other more and more as the story progresses, but I have to confess that for the first 100-150 pages or so, I thought I had picked up the wrong book! It sets the scene with all the characters other than Mallow and Harrison, and mentions hardly anything else that I could tell was relevant. I even had a sneaky peek a few hundred pages ahead to make sure what I was reading was bound in the right cover and that it was, indeed, the right book!

Even so, had I been reading something different, I still would have carried on, such was the clever writing involved. If I have one criticism, it is that the book does end rather abruptly, and I felt as a reader that I didn't really get closure on the different plot strains. One of them has a satisfactory conclusion, but the others seem to just hang in the balance, and I guess this is to show that their lives just carry on as normal, and all we have seen is a snippet, a small section, taken from them each and skillfully woven together in mesmerising format. I think, what I was really annoyed at was that, after the sublime and eccentric happenings described by Bateman, I was hoping for a bigger bang at the end of the book than I got. I felt cheated that such a good book should finish without tying up all the loose ends.

Even so, this is a wonderful written book, it my small whinge about the ending won't dissuade me from jumping to the shops to get his other books at some point, or putting them down on my wishlist. Nor will it stop me from giving this a five star rating, because the ending was no doubt deliberate to show us that while the main point of the story was Mallow's attempts to bring down Harrison, there were other things going on at the time relevant to it all, and it shows that while thing ends, others continue as if nothing had happened, and mark it down as just another chapter in their lives.

I Predict A Riot retails at £7.99, but is available from amazon.co.uk for £5.99. I recommend you buy it and read it with a big pinch of humour.

Summary: Bateman shows us what a strange world we live in!