What annoys Starkey is that in the past when starting his furniture business, Brinn had changed his Catholic-sounding surname O’Brinn to neutral Brinn, just not to offend anyone. Starkey-journalist obviously did not find it particularly amazing, but Brinn tried to defend his decision: “I think it was possibly a way of expressing my resentment at the state of affairs in this country – the fact that just because there was an ‘O’ at the start of my name a certain section of the community automatically believed that I was, in some way, the enemy.” (p.51).
Another clue that contributes to understand Northern Irish reality is closely connected with the omnipresent paramilitary organizations; regardlessly on which side they fought. The IRA, the most obvious to mention, finds its place in the novel when Parker, Starkey and Brinn are discussing another problem of Irish history – the emigration. “The Irish built the America”, reveals Brinn proudly (p.87). While the sad fact remains that most Irish Americans think “it’s romantic to support a civil war” (p.88) thus sending the highest financial contributions to the IRA, which, in fact, makes “armchair terrorists” (Ibid.) of them.
The ‘virtually opposite’ side of the IRA, the UVF, is, ironically and paradoxically, being represented by an ‘outspoken’ female taxi-driver (she had the UVF letters tattooed on her arm), whom Starkey meets two or three times during his dangerous journey. ‘The Belle of Belfast’ does not hold any fancy illusions about Starkey’s newspaper column, revealing to him it was all crap (p.61). She, having a rather tough and at the same moment simple and clear opinion on some subjects, even refuses to drive Starkey to Margaret’s place having herself heard it was “that fuckin’ Fenian hole” (Ibid.).
As far as the author’s narrative style is concerned, Colin Bateman is very easy to follow. Despite the setting in Northern Ireland we do not get much from the Gaelic language, if we ever hoped to; though not surprisingly, since the main character is British. It was only once in the whole story that Starkey corrected Parker’s bad non-Irish pronunciation of the County Tyrone; to be it pronounced “Ter-own” (p.49). From time to time, the novel approximates very closely to film, as had been already mentioned above. It is a strongly ‘action-based’ novel; its ‘clipping’ style makes us think we are watching an action/thriller movie.