Book review: The Incident by Kenneth MacLeod

TOWARDS the end of this novel, a sub-Beckettian beach bum-cum-philosopher appears and advises 20-year-old Craig McInnes, its narrator, to take up writing. Craig, paying attention from the watchtower where he’s on duty as a beach guard, says “But nothing ever happens here…”

The ragged-trousered seer, unconvinced, delivers an outline of “the five essential elements of tragedy”. This marks a rare lull in an otherwise action-ridden day, despite Craig’s assertion. The five elements it turns out are the perfect template for the contents of The Incident, a novel marked less by tragedy than by trauma.

Craig narrates the story in four extended segments, the first and third of which are second-hand accounts. The first concerns the sinking of his grandfather’s ship in wartime, the other tells of the Cold War ordeal of an escapee from East Germany, now long settled in the west. The other segments deal chronologically with what happens on the beach, just north of Hamburg, on a blistering day in July 1987, when something occurs that may scar Craig’s life.

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Kenneth Macleod, whose fiction debut this is, has a taste for the doom-laden image. Inside Craig’s tower we learn of “the shrunken husks of flies” and the many drowned wasps in the cold dregs of beer. The Germans call the watch tower “a Tomb”, “and that is exactly what it can feel like…” he says. “There are ghosts in these towers. For me… the ghosts of two children. I still wake most nights with the muffled echo of their cries… and the weight of their deaths on my conscience.” From that moment the reader’s antennae are on alert.

Nonetheless, despite the promise of doom to come, the writing throughout has an attention-holding buoyancy that results from its non-stop momentum. Craig’s grandfather, who survived a U-boat’s torpedo, floats into the story on the corpse of an unlucky shipmate, drifting towards rescue, determined to teach his grandson survival skills. Years later he tosses Craig into Loch Lomond, and watches him swim against the odds, a cruel, traumatic rite of passage which leads indirectly to that job on the crowded beach, the sea now his element, survival second nature.

The sand and sea that day are rowdy with childish pleasure. Organised youth groups ride the kayaks and float on rings, a milling ferment of activities that Craig and Holger, his colleague, must watch and protect, helping youth leaders such as Gerd and Katarina, with whom the guards have struck up a friendship. The day starts badly when Craig’s authority is challenged by a shaven headed pit-bull of a man who insists on trespassing, dragging his wife and kids towards the dunes. But thereafter the guards settle down to joking and serial drinking, Craig canoodling with Katarina, and later engaging Gerd in confessional conversation, learning the story of Gerd’s escape from East Berlin, and how, before that he’d been recruited and later tortured by the Stasi, the secret police.

Gerd’s tale is an almost apocalyptic one of deception and stubborn resistance. It is a story of self-discovery and Craig becomes riveted by its twists and constant surprises as it evolves into a near-pastiche of clandestine 1970s Cold War fiction, big on espionage and brutality but devoid of much human depth. In it women are used as sound effects for the sex scenes.

The absence of women of three dimensions (metaphorically) is inevitable perhaps in Gerd’s tale of brutal teenage awakening. It is, however, less understandable in the novel as a whole. Craig’s world – of the exploits in the guard tower – mixes voyeurism, banter and constant irresponsible drinking. It is a largely male domain, as is the segment which tells the tale of the grandfather’s journey, a world of masculine bravado and male bonding, a cult of macho physicality which reaches its peak in the blooding of Gerd for action as a spy.

This testosterone world is colourfully rendered and always truthful. Katarina – the novel’s one hope for a partial broadening of the story’s emotional range – remains undeveloped, no more than an object of male desire. And all the while we await “the incident”– which, when it comes is beautifully written, well-paced and surprising. Proof that Macleod is a fiction strategist of talent. Perhaps his next novel will have the depth to match its breadth.

The Incident

by Kenneth Macleod

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp, £12.99