A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away
Christopher Brookmyre
502 pages
published in 2001
Some books start like a steam train, gaining speed slowly but steady. Others go like a jet plane, quickly getting off the ground and going to cruising speed. This started like a rocket: a moment of anxiety when you think it's not getting off the ground and then it quickly leaves the earth behind. It's such a gripping read that I had to stay up through half the night to finish it; I just could not go to sleep before I'd finished it.
Christopher Brookmyre is yet another Scottish writer and parts of A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away reminded me of fellow Scottish writers Ian Rankin and Iain Banks. Rankin for the realistic portrayal of coplife, Banks because of the geek esthetic that shines through this novel, as it did in Banks' Complicity. Not that Brookmyre is a clone of either; he very much is his own writer. He fits in with writers like Rankin and Banks in as far as they share a common background and outlook.
Brookmyre starts the book with an extended rant against suburbia and the people who inhabit it, the small minded people who take out their frustrations in traffic, while the hero (or so you assume) is driving towards Aberdeen airport and getting away from that life. This turns out to be not the case. For one, the aircraft he ends up taking is blown up by terrorists.
For another, the real hero is Raymond Ash, a thirtysomething new English teacher and father, who is trapped in a world he didn't make. He used to be, still is really, a geek and he still likes to play online first person shooter games like Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake; at one point he even had his own cyberpub, but he had to sell it. It's all a long way away from his student days, when he and his then best mate Simon Darcourt thought they would at least be super rockstars.
But Simon Darcourt was the bloke who blew up in the first chapter, so it couldn't possibly be him he just saw at Aberdeen Airport, right? Either way, this little incident is just the start of his troubles, as that night he is the target of an assassination attempt. Meanwhile the UK is on terrorist alert, as the infamous Black Spirit has been hired to do something awful to the country as payback for the UK ousting some African dictator a while back. Whether this has anything to do with Raymond's problems, well...
Don't think I've given away the main plotpoints; the above is just the foundation for the real story. While the plot resolves around terrorism and ultimately involves Raymond trying to prevent a terrorist attack, the story is about dreams, growing up and friendship. Raymond and Simon used to be friends as students, but didn't remain friends. The reason why they didn't is what drives the novel. Raymond may look like a loser at first sight and your sympathies may lie with Simon's rant against suburbia and empty lives, but I bet this isn't the case at the end of the novel. Brookmyre takes great pleasure in showing up the inadequacies in Simon's worldview.
In the end, this is a adrenaline buster of a novel, with a deep underlying maturity. This maturity does fortunately not prevent Brookmyre from letting his enthusiasm for first person shooters show, which is a nice added bonus. I can so identify with where he is coming from, just going to uni when Duke Nukem and Quake where released and having fragfests in the computerlabs...
