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Sunday, July 26, 2009

Book review: Still Midnight

1:03 PM / Reviews / No Comments

In September 2006, Glasgow businessman Javed Mukhtar was abducted from his house in the middle of the night by armed men, who demanded a ransom of £2.5 million in return for his release. The kidnappers were ultimately apprehended shortly after retrieving a suitcase of £400,000 from an arranged pick-up point. In the process, Mukhtar was returned alive to his family, and his six kidnappers given various jail sentences ranging from three years to twelve.

I mention this because Still Midnight, the new novel by Denise Mina, widely considered to be Glasgow's finest crime writer, is not so much a loose re-imagining of the Mukhtar case as a carbon copy of it. No acknowledgement is made of the real case anywhere within the book's covers, and I don't doubt that enough was changed in order to avoid litigation (Javed Mukhtar has become Aamir Anwar, and so on), but the similarities are beyond striking, down to the time of year when the kidnap occurred, the ransom demanded, the amount ultimately handed over, and even the alleged involvement of one of the abducted man's sons, right down to his first name. This presents a problem, because those familiar with the real-life case (and it's not unreasonable to assume that a considerable portion of the book's target audience will be, given that it's arguably the most bizarre and widely-publicised kidnapping in Scottish history) will know only too well how the tale progresses and what its outcome is, making it all rather predictable.

Mina tells the tale from alternating perspectives, focusing primarily on the gang of kidnappers (six in real life, three in the novel) and a character wholly of her own creation, DS Alex Morrow. According to the back cover, Morrow "knows the difference between good and bad, [but is] not sure which she prefers any more." As far as I can gather, this is intended to be the first of several books focusing on the Morrow character, so it's with a heavy heart that I must confess to finding it extremely difficult to warm to her. She's distant, rude to everyone and so self-assured in her own moral superiority to those around her that she openly chastises her boss, on extremely slim evidence, for being racist. (He appoints a male colleague to head up the investigation; she assumes that this is because he thinks the kidnap victim's Muslim family won't cooperate with a woman.) A fairly obvious twist is introduced two-thirds of the way through the novel, attempting to explain the character's obnoxiousness, but it ultimately feels like a cheap ploy. Showing a character to be a thoroughly nasty individual and then retroactively introducing an excuse for his/her actions is something I've always considered to be lazy storytelling. Mina's first protagonist, Maureen O'Donnell of the Garnethill trilogy (still in my opinion her best work), had endured a horrible past, arguably considerably worse than the ordeal Alex Morrow is revealed to have gone through, but I never got the impression that Maureen's past was being used to excuse bad behaviour. On the contrary, one of the most enduring aspects of the Garnethill novels was Maureen's determination to overcome what had happened to her and emergence as both a fighter and a fundamentally moral individual. Maureen invoked both sympathy and admiration without ever asking for them. I found myself unable to feel either for Alex.

On some level, this may be intentional. We spend as much time with the kidnappers as with Alex, and one of them actually ends up being far more sympathetic than the supposed protagonist. (Alex Morrow may be unable to decide whether she prefers good or bad, but after finishing the book I was personally in little doubt.) Pat is a reluctant participant in the kidnapping, and from the moment he enters the Mukhtar household brandishing a gun, he regrets ever agreeing to go along with the plan. In the process he manages to accidentally shoot Aamir's sixteen-year-old daughter, Aleesha (an atheist and the black sheep of a deeply religious family), severely disfiguring her hand, and spends the remainder of the novel alternating between feeling deep remorse over what he did to fantasising about what it would be like to be involved with a girl like her. This, incidentally, leads to an utterly bizarre second encounter between the two characters and an ending that left me absolutely slack-jawed as to its implausibility.

Mina has always excelled at depicting the seedy criminal underbelly of Glasgow, and this one is no exception, vividly depicting both the gangsters and their surroundings with a minimum of words. Her prose is always efficient, which I wish could be said of more authors, and there can be little doubt that she is writing with authority (and if she isn't, she does a terrific job of covering it up). That said, in many ways it feels hastily assembled, which may an accurate representation of how it came to being. Originally, Mina's next book was slated to be the fourth instalment in her "Paddy Meehan" saga, but this failed to materialise in time for its scheduled 2008 release. This is pure speculation, but I wonder whether Still Midnight was perhaps thrown together by the author to honour her contract with the publisher. This would certainly explain the story having been literally "plucked from the headlines" with little in the way of re-imagining, and also why, despite the vividness of the prose, the story unfolds in a manner that feels oddly indifferent. With an unappealing protagonist and a lingering sense of predictability, Still Midnight is comfortably the weakest of the seven Denise Mina novels I've read as of writing.*

PS. This book could have benefited from some serious proof-reading. In addition to a multitude of punctuation errors (e.g. " ’ " used to open quotations and " ‘ " to close them), there are a handful of grammatical mistakes, including at least one sentence whose meaning is rendered utterly indecipherable, and the misspelling, on at least two occasions, of the Glasgow area of Pollokshields.

* I've yet to read the stand-alone Sanctum.

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