Greg Lowe
Unlike most people, Jane Flemming, the protagonist of Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre’s novel All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye, can pinpoint the exact turn of events that transformed her life.
A drunken, awkward, and most importantly unprotected bout of unsatisfying sex with her Catholic boyfriend Tom morphed the 19-year old blue-haired punk rocker into the embodiment of the sensibilities of middle age.
Pregnancy and motherhood ensure that her life in East Kilbride, Scotland, was never the same again. Time was no longer spent hanging out with her pals Corpse-Boy, Tina Toxic and Suzie Spiteful. The anarchic revolution of teenage spirit that was punk rock fizzled out, to be replaced by newfound fetishes for hoovering. Marks & Spencer nylons, and bargain-hunting at the supermarket.
It doesn’t take too long for Tom’s once-exciting attributes of maturity, employability and financial solvency lose their lustre, as his true nature as a dullard shines through. Fast-forward 25 years, two kids and one grandchild later, and it becomes clear to Jane that she will forever inhabit a life devoid of excitement.
Not exactly an adrenaline-fuelled, high-octane action-packed plot for a thriller, you say? Well fortunately, this is where Mr Brookmyre works his magic.
Somewhere across the English Channel in France, Jane’s estranged son Ross, a non-lethal weapons expert, barely escapes a snatch attempt from a bunch of hired hardmen working for an arms company. On the run, and, momentarily, out of reach, the bad guys focus their attention on Ross’s weak points in order to persuade him to come in, namely his sister Michelle’s daughter Rachel.
It is here, when Rachel is grabbed from a popular kid’s adventure park, that Jane has her renaissance. The hired muscle forgot about one thing: the unbridled fury, wrath and violence of a granny protecting her kin. As Jane’s subconscious genetic programming switches into all-or-nothing mode in the defence of her flesh and blood, she takes her first steps down on a dangerous path of adventure and intrigue that will leave her a changed woman.
Observed from the sidelines by a team of misfit mercenaries – headed by the brusque, brutal, but charismatic Bett – hired to find and protect by Ross, our favourite granny is given an ultimatum. To help her son she must get to a destination in France within 24 hours. The problem is she has no passport, cash of plane tickets.
In something akin to Shirley Valentine meets A Long Kiss Goodnight, Jane uses her previously unrealized skills of subterfuge, theft and deception to find her way across the English Channel, where she meets Team Bett face-to-face.
Bett and his mercenaries are an odd bunch. The multilingual military expert of on undefinable nationality has collected himself a group of highly-skilled but slightly unhinged characters. You meet his oldest comrade Armand; Nuno, a former-Spanish cop who refused to take a bribe; Lex, a Candian computer whiz kid; renegade US Navy pilot Rebekah; and Som, a Thai tech genius, with a penchant for DIY surveillance gadgetry.
Jane’s newfound talents are further enhanced by hardcore intense training in firearms, martial arts and close-quarter surveillance, making her into one Scottish grandmother you really wouldn’t want to cross. Armed and dangerous, she joins the team in its against-the-clock quest for Ross.
Wedding dark humour and fast-paced thriller action is no mean feat, but Brookmyre accomplishes this task with ease, and overall to good effect. His style sits somewhere in between his Scottish contemporaries, never quite reaching the imaginative depravities of Iain Banks or Irvine Welsh, but being more of a romp than hard-boiled plots of Ian Rankin, with his characters somewhat less broken.
However, towards the end of the novel Brookmyre tries too hard to keep the joke going beyond its natural limits, the story become overly predictable, but he stops the plot having a cardiac arrest by mainting the overall pace and flow, and there’s enough twists and turns to keep readers happily engaged.
All Fun and Games is best described as an intelligent mass market thriller that incorporates action, espionage, and a laconic Scottish wit. There’s a fair amount of soul-searching by the characters, all of whom have unresolved issues to deal with, and one sex scene where Jane discovers carnal pleasures that she had previously resigned herself to dying without experiencing. So for her, the story is as much a journey of self-discovery, as one in which to save her son.
Throughout the book the author goes beyond merely entertaining readers, and gives us all a firm kick in the backside to remind us that life is too short and valuable to fritter away in supermarket queues and in front of soap operas. But hopefully it won’t take a killing spree to realize this.
