An Island Burning by Colin MacIntyre review: 'stretches credulity'
The latest of Colin MacIntyre’s Mull Mysteries has too many subplots and a surfeit of similes, writes David Robinson
The Oban ferry has just docked at Craignure, and two Ford Fiestas are clattering down the ramp. In one of them, a government energy minister and her civil servant adviser are on their way to Dervaig – ostensibly to to calm local fears about a planned wind farm but in reality to scope the feasibility of an asylum seekers’ camp on Mull. In the passenger seat of the other car is a Bosnian refugee convinced he set fire to the Glasgow School of Art the previous night and who has been told to hide some parcels (drugs? bombs?) where the driver won’t find them.
These, though, are just the sub-plots – so sub, in fact, that we hardly hear any more about the proposed asylum seekers’ camp, which is a bit ironic given that it is one strand in the second of Colin MacIntyre’s Mull Mysteries series which, even though it never happened, has a solid basis in fact.
Once again, MacIntyre’s main man is a character who has haunted his imagination since 2015, when The Letters of Ivor Punch won the First Book Award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Punch, a police sergeant in Tobermory, “knew to play a bit daft and loose with certain people, to keep them on their toes”, which makes him sound a bit like a Hebridean Columbo, albeit in uniform and with a small flask of Glen Bellart in his top pocket. Like practically every experienced cop in fiction, he acts on instinct and is infuriated by his by-the-book deputy (PC Cluny: Bearsden posh and teetotal) straight out of Tulliallan.
From the start, we know that Punch will be dealing with a psychopath. The locals are strong on nicknames, and this one announces himself in the first chapter as Bearfoot. He has set fire to two cars in the middle of a remote Mull glen (maybe you’re ahead of me here) having first removed the corpses of their occupants. Then, as a special challenge to Punch (why? No idea) he returns to place two sets of teeth inside the burnt-out wrecks. Later, hunting for clues, Punch notices a bear claw print beside them. If you know someone who answers to Bearfoot (although only one person does), it looks a suspiciously easy case to crack.
First, though, first we have to swim through a whole shoal of red herrings or at least very fishy plot twists. When Robert Louis Stevenson wanders into Punch’s police house, helps himself to a whisky, and tells him about the legend that a mysterious island is about to make a once-a-century appearance, we might suspect that MacIntyre is nudging the staid old police procedural towards new territory. A drunk’s ramblings about a mysterious island known as The Looming (which also figured in MacIntyre’s debut novel) might seem to confirm this, but even though the plot also includes a dramatic appearance by Robert Burns at Mull Little Theatre and a series of fires breaking out all over the island, our imaginations are not stretched as much as our credulity.
MacIntyre is, of course, best known as award-winning musician/songwriter Mull Historical Society, and his novel is replete with musical references. There is no doubting his inventiveness and his insights into island life ring true. But inventiveness can sometimes be a curse, especially if plot twists are prioritised over character, or if – as repeatedly happens – apt enough similes are extended ad absurdum (“Cluny arrived behind Punch like a red setter waiting on a walk. Punch was tempted to add a collar to the man’s paraphernalia. Ears up for a walk, tail up for toilet”).
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it threads together such great piles of backstory, along with a wildly over-caffeinated denouement, that it spoils the book. Some people might applaud its ingenuity; to me, it felt more like whiplash.
An Island Burning, by Colin MacIntyre, Black & White, £9.99
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