High Dive

by Jonathan Lee Narrated by Gerard Doyle

Overview

In September 1984, a bomb was planted at the Grand Hotel in the seaside town of Brighton, England, set to explode in twenty-four days when the British prime minister and her entire cabinet would be staying there. High Dive not only takes us inside this audacious assassination attempt-a decisive act of violence on the world stage-but also imagines its way into a group of unforgettable characters. Nimbly weaving together fact and fiction, comedy and tragedy, the story switches among the perspectives of Dan, a young IRA explosives expert; Moose, a former star athlete gone to seed, who is now the deputy hotel manager; and Freya, his teenage daughter, trying to decide what comes after high school. Over the course of a mere four weeks, as the prime minister's arrival draws closer, each of their lives will be transformed forever.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Emily Bobrow

For a novel about an attempted political assassination, High Dive is fairly light on politics. Lee touches on the turmoil in Northern Ireland…But this is no history lesson, nor is it a post-mortem assessment of Thatcherism and its discontents. Lee's preoccupations are more personal. He spends much of the book in Brighton, inventing the lives and loves of a few hotel employees in the flurry before the conference…High Dive…is a tender story about the hopes and flaws of ordinary people made extraordinary by events.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

…vibrantly cinematic…Rather than slavishly recreating the Brighton bombing in its every detail, Mr. Lee freestyles, creating a sympathetic ensemble both at the Grand Hotel and in the streets of Belfast…all while making expert use of the dramatic tension inherent in waiting for a lethal explosion. His book reminds one of Alfred Hitchcock's distinction between surprise and suspense: Surprise is when the audience has no clue that there's a bomb beneath the table and it suddenly goes off; suspense, Hitchcock explained, is when "the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there." We saw Dan put it there. It's suspense that pulls us in. We make so many complex emotional investments in the lives of Mr. Lee's characters, including Dan, that it takes a monk's restraint not to flip to the very end of the book before you get there.

From the Publisher

“A masterly novel . . . Achingly good . . . At his best—and he is at it often—Lee displays a nimble metaphysical wit and a verbal ingenuity on a par with Martin Amis’s.”
—Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker 

“High Dive is a novel so smart and compassionate and beautifully written that it asks for total immersion. A reader will hold her breath for long, perfectly-paced stretches, and she will surface, dizzied, at the end.” 
—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

“A beautifully realized novel about the intertwining of loyalty, family, ambition and politics…. Long after the bomb goes off, long after I closed the book, I found myself wondering about Moose and Freya and Dan. That persistence of interest is a testament to how fully realized those characters are, and how astonishingly well executed this novel is....Exquisitely rendered.”
—The Washington Post

“Inspired . . . Lee creates a sympathetic ensemble both at the Grand Hotel and in the streets of Belfast, all while making expert use of the dramatic tension inherent in waiting for a lethal explosion . . . [There’s] a sort of phyllo-dough layering that makes High Dive so rich . . . We make so many complex emotional investments in the lives of Lee’s characters that it takes a monk’s restraint not to flip to the very end of the book before you get there . . . There’s great range and compassion and high-definition imagery in Lee’s writing . . . Devastating.”
—Jennifer Senior, New York Times

“A mongrel blend of political thriller, dark comedy, and pathos  . . . Tolstoy’s sense—of an overpowering momentum of events, in which humans may act but ultimately fade back into insignificance—hovers in a ghostly way around the pages of High Dive . . . Boldly imagine[d].”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Highly amusing and ultimately very moving . . . Lee draws the reader into his characters’ lives with such sympathy and affection that when that inevitable explosion occurs, its impact is all the more devastating.”
 —Wall Street Journal 

“A tender story about the hopes and flaws of ordinary people made extraordinary by events . . . Lee keeps the drama taut.”
—New York Times Book Review
 
“Brilliant, urgent, unstoppable . . . An incredible novel of rare insight, velocity, depth, and daring.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed)
 
“In fluent, agile prose Jonathan Lee takes on one of the more famous assassination plots in recent history with striking evenhandedness and depth. His novel offers a funny, gripping, and ultimately tragic view into the life of a young IRA man and the dear price he, and his victims, pay during the dark years of the Troubles.” 
 —Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

“High Dive is a fascinating look into a troubled past. In taut scene after taut scene, with a fine style and wit among the carnage, Jonathan Lee does service to history and the novel both.”
—Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

“Excellent . . . Provocative, moving . . . High Dive is not only a well-executed suspense novel or political thriller (although it’s both). Lee also takes great care in constructing detailed, empathetic portraits of his characters, investing readers in their fates and adding depth and nuance to his story. He blends fact with fiction, comedy with tragedy, and comes up with a seamless depiction of what happens at the crossroads of ordinary life and history.”
—Miami Herald

“Yesterday I spent the day ignoring my work and my family, because I couldn’t look up from the pages of High Dive by Jonathan Lee. The book is that good! Poignant and funny, beautifully written. It’s a marvel.”
—Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Treasure

“An excellent new novel . . . His book is a subtle examination of lives that didn’t turn out as planned and of parents struggling to keep their children from making the same mistakes.”
—Houston Chronicle
 
“With wry wit and profound tenderness, Jonathan Lee’s High Dive highlights the tensions—between hope and heartbreak, struggle and surrender—at the intersection of the mundane and the momentous. A bold, thrilling triumph of a book.”
—Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife

“A brilliant, tense new novel . . . Somehow, through his fine-grained attention to the light and shade of human feeling, Lee makes us reflect on the grandest and most intractable questions. Seldom has a novel made me feel so intensely the double binds of historical guilt or the utter inadequacy of all our moral accountings. High Dive is a gorgeous, compassionate book. Please read it.”
—Garth Greenwell, Electric Literature

 “Lee’s writing has a marked freshness, his pacing and dialogue are exceptional, and every scene is deftly handled. This is a real craftsman at work.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
 
“Lee moves with ease between the epic and the intimate . . . Full of humor and compassion.”
—Catherine Lacey, The Paris Review

“Jonathan Lee is a writer of stylish concision, humour, wisdom, and danger.”
—Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins

“A completely absorbing novel about the lives of people who struggle in small and massive ways. Lee’s writing is poignant, fluid, and very funny. Above all else it feels honest—you can see yourself in all of his characters. I really did love this book, and I’m still thinking and worrying about it.”
—Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing
 
“High Dive is both wistful and very funny. It is also genuinely lyrical. But more than anything, what distinguishes it from so many other novels is its rare sincerity.”
—Alexander Maksik, author of A Marker to Measure Drift

“Lee’s an excellent storyteller, the kind you’d follow anywhere—his prose is full of sharp wit and surprising empathy, easily earning complete absorption.”
—Guernica

“Every assassination is a plot with personal history and national history intertwined, action and inaction offsetting each other, misstep transforming into opportunity, luck submitting to fate. Jonathan Lee is a virtuoso storyteller, combining the skills of a historian, a reporter, a criminal psychologist, and most importantly, a close observer of the complexity of everyday life. What a thrilling new novel.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Kinder Than Solitude

“In The Line of Beauty, the winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize, Alan Hollinghurst achieved a breakthrough, portraying Thatcher as a lightning rod and exploring precisely the extremities of response to which his emotive predecessors had succumbed. In High Dive, the celebrated young British novelist Jonathan Lee puts the prime minister in even clearer perspective . . . Her presence enables Lee’s novel to bypass a crude critique, or cartoon version, of the period in order to portray individual lives floundering and changing in the midst of social and political upheaval.”
—Leo Robson, The Atlantic

“Beautifully written and utterly absorbing.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Every character feels fully realized; the ensemble has the most individualized identities of any group I’ve read in the past few years.”
 —Kansas City Star

“We ask literature at its best to do more than entertain, but it is no bulwark against terrorist violence. What we can expect is a rendering of our fault-lines and a context that honors our common humanity. It is here that Jonathan Lee excels.”
—Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star 

“As poignant and powerful as it is humorous and heartbreaking . . . Tense [and] gripping . . . Jonathan Lee has certainly written a novel for our times.
—Steven Whitton,

“Lee is a wonderful writer; High Dive a novel with extraordinary qualities . . . It’s a book with virtuosity shot through many scenes.”
—Newsday

“Brilliant. . . A poignant, multi-voiced account of the precarious weeks leading up to the explosion, High Dive offers an intimate look at tragedy, loyalty, and a pivotal moment in history.”
—Buzzfeed.com, “The 27 Most Exciting Books Coming in 2016”

Praise from the UK:

“Hauntingly atmospheric . . . Lee is quite brilliant at excavating the disappointments of characters constantly chasing lost opportunities . . . High Dive is, of course, a historical novel, detailing events that took place more than 30 years ago, yet there is always a sense of immediacy to the prose . . . In the mundane, Jonathan Lee finds the deep end, where all are diving for dear life.”
—The Guardian
 
“Highly accomplished . . . Absorbing . . . Moving . . . The author powerfully uses a prismatic range of perspectives . . . The political is intricately interwoven with the personal . . . Lee dives deep into the minds and hearts of his characters, skillfully shoring up ‘the private moments history so rarely records.’”
—The Observer
 
“Rich in the comedy of the mundane: the hopes and petty quarrels neatly contrasted with the approaching terror.”
—Daily Mail
 
“Riveting . . . Novels about terrorism aren’t usually this tender. It’s Lee’s way of bringing home the cost of bloodshed . . . A tragic-comic tale full of warmth and muddled humanity.”
—Metro
 
“Utterly absorbing and beautifully wrought.”
—BBC Radio 4 “Open Book” 

“Lee’s powerful novel is an extraordinary performance: vividly written, painfully human, and fully fleshing the inner lives of its characters.”
 —Sunday Times
 
“What’s clear straight away is how good Lee is on character . . . He can be very funny too . . . Moose is a terrific creation.”
—Spectator

“An ingenious and original mixture of the domestic and the political . . . At its heart is a father-and-daughter relationship that feels uncannily real and wonderfully touching.”
—David Nicholls, The Guardian

“Lee masterfully ekes poetry out of everyday life . . . As a character study, High Dive is faultless. Freya, Moose, and Dan exist, you know them, they are gloriously and fully realized . . . For sheer beauty of description and engaging personal tone, my recommendation is High Dive.”
—Stylist
 
“Lee writes well about the inner lives of his characters and his sensitivity to the complexity of human motivations shows evidence of an empathetic and forgiving emotional intelligence. The pictures he draws of the apparently unknowable nature of those to whom we are closest are poignant and memorable.”
—Literary Review

“In High Dive, Jonathan Lee—a wordsmith of incomparable eloquence—has forged a canny edifice, intricately constructed . . . Electrifying . . . A work of serious and thoughtful integrity.”
—The Independent
 
“Refreshing . . . Warm and compassionate . . . High Dive is a moving and charismatic novel . . . It succeeds, through its multiple sympathies and scrupulous empathy, on its own terms.”
—Financial Times

“A courageous work of art that works its own kind of high dive trick—a relentless momentum whose twists demand close attention. Jonathan Lee is a real talent.”
—South China Morning Post

“Lee has crafted an absorbing character piece that feels startlingly real . . . Extremely relatable . . . High Dive is funny, troublesome, and poignant, and will cement Lee’s reputation.”
—The Herald (Scotland)

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-12-23
Two absorbing narrative lines follow an imagined perpetrator and potential victims in the 1984 bombing that targeted Margaret Thatcher and other Conservative Party notables meeting at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England. Lee (Who Is Mr Satoshi, 2010, etc.) uses few historical characters as his story toggles within a fictional trio: Dan, an accomplice to the bombing; the hotel's deputy manager, nicknamed Moose; and his feisty daughter, Freya. After initiation into the Provisional Irish Republican Army at 18, Dan is shown briefly working on smaller "ops" but mainly sharing with his widowed mother a fairly normal life in Northern Ireland. His role in the bombing begins when he checks into the hotel and offers cover for an IRA explosives expert. Moose is caught up in preparations for the Conservative Party conference that will have Margaret Thatcher and Cabinet members staying at the Grand. If it goes off well, so to speak, he expects to become the general manager. The divorced father worries about Freya, 18, who is marking time before college with a job on the hotel's front desk, finding and losing a beau, and fighting with or fretting over her dad. The fragile normalcy of these lives on both sides of the Irish Sea is nicely conveyed, with smaller points of tension adding to the reader's anticipation of the known climax, such as Dan's sense of a growing threat to his home and mother or Moose's loss of managerial control when he suffers a heart attack. The bomb itself is the main slow-burning fuse of suspense, detonated late in the tale. As one character says of movies, "sometimes the before is more interesting than the after." Lee's writing has a marked freshness, his pacing and dialogue are exceptional, and every scene is deftly handled. This is a real craftsman at work.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171738365
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/08/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Jonathan Lee

1

Dan’s first op for the Provos was in darkness, an alley off the Falls Road, half a decade before Dawson McCartland would ask him to become Roy Walsh. He was crouched with his back against a rough brick wall and a man called Colum Allen was beside him. Colum was sometimes called Hallion or Hallinan or the Welsh Saint, the last of these nicknames persisting despite his energetic claims to have no Welsh in him at all. He was tall and thin with a great vein forking up the left side of his neck. Even in the dim you could see it flickering. It moved whenever he spoke, which was always. His leg jerked up and down. Punching his palm was a frequent hobby too. Nodding his head. Biting his fingernails. Humming. Singing. Some of the many daily ways Colum relieved the pressure of being Colum.

“Predetermined is what it is.” Colum’s voice was a quick whisper. “Last time was unlucky, isn’t it? Whole season unlucky. Fuckers this season are on the ropes. Inevitable. Fuckers home in an ambulance. Been lucky. Got a destiny that’s not what they think, to be sure.”

Chance and fate, Dan had started to see, were a great pre-occupation of guys engaged in reckless deeds. He didn’t trust Colum to do a good job. Didn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut after. It was exhausting to think of all the ways he didn’t trust him and why had they been paired together? Dawson kept telling Dan he’d be able to work soon with Patrick. Kept telling him Patrick was too well known to the authorities now—couldn’t be the face of operations, only the brains, needed help. Dawson kept saying Dan and Patrick would make a great team one day, but here he was, teamed with Colum Allen, talking football.

“Agree with sacking Steiny? How could a man. How could. But a man gets no silverwear for the Celtic, his history is history, isn’t it? Fuckers got short memories is what they’ve got. Anyway—” he coughed—“this your debut, is it?”

Dan stood for a moment to grant some relief to his legs, then went back to crouching and squinting. Occasional shapes animated the gloom at the end of the alley. Occasional voices too. There was advance word of RUC raids happening here tonight. The idea was for Dan and Colum to disrupt the raids as much as possible. They had gear on the ground in two zipped bags.

Nerves. When Dan was nervous he didn’t gibber or fiddle with his hands like Colum. Instead, basic questions surfaced. Such as: What am I doing here? Or: Will I end up with a bullet in my brain? Another cool wind was picking up grit. They waited.

“Paddy’s your man, is he?”

Dan was silent. Disconcerting to think a guy as simple as Colum could have a read on your thoughts.

“Internment, was he?”

“Yeah,” Dan said. “I think so.”

“Whole year?”

“No idea.”

“Two?”

“Dunno.”

“Fuckers keep their secrets.”

He knew exactly how long Patrick had been interned by the Brits without trial. But he’d also learned that it was unwise to give your facts away for free. Sharing less—sometimes less than was decent—made the other person uncomfortable. In an uncomfortable silence, people gave you more of themselves. The RUC had apparently come at dawn to pick Patrick up. The whine of the Saracens, bulky six-wheeled monsters, being slipped into a low gear. A dimmed stage, dark vehicles, blackened faces, not unlike the expected scene tonight; the occasional white blotch from a Catholic paint bomb. The whole of your life in Belfast was organised around light and dark, visibility and invisibility, silence and sound, information and secrecy, the private rubbing up against the public and making you feel tired. None of this Dan said to Colum.

“Heard about your initiation,” Colum said. “Aye. The dogs. That one’s getting nice and famous. Though I expect he was only preparing Your Majesty for obstacles others might raise.”

Don’t give in, Dan thought. But he gave in. “What did you hear?”

Colum grinned and scratched his neck, staring at the ground as if it were the future. “Other option, course, is he just wanted to give you nightmares. Dawson McCartland’s nice like that. Fuckers love a good nightmare.” He clicked his fingers. “My first time? They gave me a gun and an address and that was that.”

“I won’t be doing any of that stuff.”

“What?”

“House calls.”

“Ha,” Colum said, and allowed himself an unusual pause. “Demoralises the police, stiffing them at home. Shows all the other police there’s no place that’s their own to relax, they said. Hadn’t even occurred. I was even younger than you, probably. I was seventeen. So I’m realising quick I’m going to have to get a ride into an Orangies’ area. And I’m realising a certain amount of planning needs to be done for the runback, though I’ve got only a day to do it. So the day comes and I’m wearing a Rangers badge, right? Though it kills me, so it does. And I’m wearing a pair of Beatle boots I got hold of from a fat lad. And all the while they’re not telling me much about this guy I’m going to stiff or any real advice, tips if you will, but I’m used to that, aren’t I? Grandfather used to be an Ulster fiddler, a virtuoso in Donegal—really. Took an awful reddener when he forgot his music one day. None of those fiddler men would let you in on their performance practices, no way; that’s what I’m sayin’. It’s a similar thing. So anyway, I go and stiff the guy and his wife comes screaming into the hall, looking at the pool of blood. Cool as anything I was. Just did the thing and left.”

Dan nodded. “Sure.” People were always heroes in their own telling.

“Yeah,” Colum said. “It was only once I got back to my district and had my first pint that the whole thing went right up on me. Shaking all over I was. Been shaking mostly ever since.”

He had Dan’s attention now. Night clouds moved across the moon. In a brief breeze an empty can rolled towards them and Colum’s shoulders did a jump. They laughed.

A whining sound. A few thin flickers of light. Colum got up. “Here we go,” he said, newly hard in the face, oddly impressive-looking. He picked up the bags. They ran to the end of the alley.

“Wait.”

Dan did as he was told. The black Saracens were creeping along the Falls, slow and certain. The walls flanking this section of the road were painted black, a mass redaction of the murals of Bobby Sands and other heroes. The sound of heavy boots. Foot patrols moving behind and alongside the Saracens. Even if Colum had brought his gun with him, there was no way you could see the men well enough to snipe them. All of the officers were wearing black. Anything else would have spoiled the decor.

They watched as two RUC men broke down the first door to a Catholic home. The groan of the wood giving in. Dan’s heart going hard. In the first open bag a dozen plastic bottles. Each of them was three-quarters full with white paint and water. “Quick now,” Colum said. They scrambled to unscrew five or six lids. In another bag they had waterproof sheeting tied around chunks of dry ice. They started squeaking fragments of dry ice into the open bottles of paint, screwing the lids back on. Colum slapped Dan’s face. “Quick, I said.” Running.

Out into the open road. They got alongside the Saracens, a taste of smoke in the air, a soulful adrenalin building. A woman dragged out onto the street was saying “Don’t you touch the inside of my house!” Men from the foot patrol were running into her home and another man, lank and stooped in the dim of the moon, had his hand around the woman’s mouth. Colum hurled the first bottle. The lazy grace of it in the air and the little crackle and pop as it hit bodywork and exploded. Better than when they’d rehearsed. Perfect. White paint sprawling out on the Saracen, white paint dripping and pooling. Dan hurled two bottles. His blood was swaying. Hurt to breathe. Neither exploded. He needed to throw them harder, higher. Colum was shouting “Pots and pans! Pots and pans!” without a single tremor in his voice.

Dan went to ground, grit in his elbows, and pressed more fragments of dry ice into bottles. He sprinted, the bags banging on his shoulders, and threw a bottle at an RUC man—missed—but then one of Colum’s bottles looped and the man’s uniform was half white and the man yelled, fell. Another Saracen backing up to the front door of the next Catholic home to be searched and torn apart. Another throw. Dan was screaming “Pots! Pots! Pots!” and like magic windows were opening all down the street. Colum must have lobbed another bottle high—Dan could see it coming down almost at a vertical—and paint exploded over the roof of a Saracen. A precision hit. He’d got Colum all wrong. Loved the man in this moment. Loved him. Catholic women were leaning out of windows banging pots and pans. The whole street waking up and making noise, ensuring others rose and joined. Don’t let these men rip our floorboards up. Don’t let them call our freedom fighters terrorists. Some of the women were throwing glass bottles stuffed with burning hankies towards the blotches of white, tiny bursts of fire near the targets, three and then six and then more. Other women were in the street in nighties. They were standing in the way of the Saracens and banging their pots and pans above their heads, shouting “Put the fires out if you like! Go on then!” Shouting “What’s a taste of water then? Give us a shower!” All this as Dan ran into another dark alley, the last of his bottles used up, changing into clean clothes and beginning the long jog home.

In training he tried to show that he was hungry for knowledge. There seemed to be an infinite supply. There was more artistry to violence than he’d ever expected, more technique and philosophy. Months rolled by with only paint-bomb operations. Less a war than an apprenticeship—someone finally taking him under their wing. They told him they thought his future was bright.

In a warehouse space that smelt of raw meat they taught him how to open and split a shotgun cartridge. They taught him that candle wax in the tip made it hold together on impact. Mercury in the cartridge made it more deadly. Garlic purée in the cartridge put poison in the blood. They taught him to smear axle grease on a bullet to make it fly through reinforced doors. They taught him to pack cartridges with rice to slow them down. They showed him all the things you could do with the looped brake cable of a pushbike. A knife in a body needs to be twisted upward. Bulletproof glass has a blue-green glint. If a friend’s car is stolen, call Sinn Fein on this number. If a friend’s family is persecuted, call Sinn Fein on that number. Golf courses are for golf and the storage of weapons. Some people relax by emptying magazine after magazine into oil drums, tree stumps, the tyres of abandoned cars; others prefer the cold sophistication of invention, electrics, tricks with cassette-recorder parts. You can hammer away at Semtex with a rolling pin, shifting its shape to fit a suitable space. You can do anything you like, just don’t get any on your hands. On his nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first birthdays Dawson sent packets of cash.

Excerpted from High Dive by Jonathan Lee. Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Lee. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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