Country: Northern Ireland
Genre: Crime
Pages: 499 kb (eOriginal)
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"I've never killed anyone in my life. What made you think I'd be up for this?"
"It's not like you'd be killing real people, Dermot. They're Yardies. Those wankers are always shooting each other in the back. It won't even make the papers."
Gerard Brennan's WEE ROCKETS is the prime example of everything good about ePublishing. The boldness, the uncompromising spirit of writers that don't have a marketing department to please. The young Northern Irish writer has kept busy over the last year, releasing the novella THE POINT, WEE ROCKETS and staying active on the short story market. His first novel doesn't lack ambition. Brennan doesn't write within traditional crime fiction paradigm. WEE ROCKETS isn't articulated around a central crime, but rather around a complete neighborhood. It's a novel without a hero, where everybody is trying to get by the best way they can. Brennan moves an impressive cast of characters along the pages of his novel, sometimes at the expense of its pacing, but to his credit he doesn't take any shortcuts. There is more than fiction at stake here, WEE ROCKETS is a borderline social novel.
There are three major storylines, intertwined together. Stephen McVeigh, a local football star who's looking to rid the streets of his neighborhood of gang activity. He's unto the Wee Rockets, unruly teenagers who terrorize the honest people. Then there's Joe Phillips. The Rockets' leader, looking for a way out of the life, along with his friend Danny. McVeigh is cracking down on Joe and he uses his friendship to Danny's older brother Paul to put some pressure.There is also Dermot in the portrait. Joe's estranged father, looking for a way back in his life and into "the life". Those are the three main angles to WEE ROCKETS, but there is more. There's the story of Liam, one of Joe's soldiers with dreams of leadership. There is also Wee Paul, Stephen's best friend with his own world of issues.
See where this is going? Reading WEE ROCKETS, I kept thinking about two things. First, the novels of Richard Price and Irvine Welsh, which often contain crime fiction elements, but who are about bigger issues. Poverty, failure of the education system, broken families dynamics, etc. Also, it reminded me of David Simon's THE WIRE, with its impressive cast and byzantine plot lines. Given that HBO's legendary show could have been a five novels series, something like WEE ROCKETS will feel a little simple in comparison. That's the main issue I had with it. Its structured to support epic length, thousand pages and such. Since the novel is not that long, it feels a little disinvested. Like it's taking on too many problems and storylines to get into all of them properly.
"But nothing. You've hijacked that fucking car from me. Bad enough that I bought the model you were wetting yourself over, now you're going to tart it up to make it look like even more of a girl's car? I can barely sit in it without taking a reddener as it is. But this bunny sticker? Fuck! Do you want to just stick a pair of tits on me now? Call me Paula?"
But don't you love that an author has the balls to do this? Take on social issues the same way Price, Welsh and Simon did? WEE ROCKETS is a work of terrific ambition. Gerard Brennan set the bar very high for himself with this novel and managed to not mess it up. I wasn't expecting such a challenging novel when I picked it up, but I was pleasantly surprised. Think of WEE ROCKETS as Richard Price meets Colin Bateman and Irvine Welsh's lovechild. It's ambitious, maybe a little too much, but it doesn't leave any stones unturned. Another strong release from Blasted Heath Publishing. If Gerard Brennan can pull off something so daring and complex at his first novel without messing it up, the man has a great future as a writer.
THREE STARS
THREE STARS