Told in eight chapters, each corresponding to a week’s edition of the Express (and each representing a crisis / opportunity for the Express and its staff), Paper Cuts is a charming account of the qualified joys of local journalism. Bateman, who left school aged 16 to take up a position as cub reporter with the County Down Spectator, appears to share Rob Cullen’s reluctant appreciation of local newspapers. They might be, as Rob suggests, ‘like community goldfish bowls. The same stories kept coming around, year after year after decade,’ but Rob also believes that the Express has a duty of care to its readership: ‘It serves the community, it protects the community, it tells you who the bad guys are and stops them getting away with it.’
If Rob believes he has taken on a noble task, however, his idealism is rather undercut when Alix, the main reporter amidst the demoralised staff, prosaically describes the Express as ‘a dysfunctional family. A dysfunctional, highly unpopular and poverty-stricken family.’
The clash between the staff’s cynical pragmatism and Rob’s principled theories of journalism provides the story with its narrative tension, as Rob learns to accept his own limitations along with those of his co-workers and his new home. Bangor is a sleepy, peaceful seaside town – ‘One of those towns that had escaped the worst and even the least of the Troubles – three bombs in thirty years, a handful of shootings; hell, there were towns in Surrey that had had it worse, nearly.’ – but fans of Bateman’s crime novels shouldn’t fret. Given the nature of local reporting, there are enough crime-based stories in Paper Cuts to fuel a modest crime fiction career, as Rob and his team find themselves investigating ex-paramilitaries, sex-traffickers, bodies dumped in fly-tipping sites, mysterious arsons, the exploitation of refugees, and even a siege when an armed robber botches his heist of the local post office.
The story is peppered with Bateman’s blackly comic asides, as when Alix reflects on how boring her job is. ‘Of course,’ she concludes, ‘there hadn’t been a lot of decapitated heads during her time on the Express. That was wishful thinking.’ There’s a sly humour, too, in the way the apparently explosive crime stories the reporters investigate rarely turn out to be what they appear at first glance; Bateman takes us behind the lurid headlines to explore the human impact of local journalism (and, in the process, turn the traditional narrative of crime fiction on its head), as villains turn out to be heroes, and victims are revealed to be nowhere as powerless as they might seem.
Paper Cuts may be the first non-crime novel Bateman has written, but it’s the latest example of a writer who has been taking artistic gambles for some time now – apart from his TV crime writing, Bateman has written an opera about King Billy, a musical about The Undertones, and the script to the Irish language drama Scúp, which was set in a newsroom and from which Paper Cuts emerged (he has also written the script for The Journey, a film about the relationship between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, which is due for release later this year).
Long one of Ireland’s most prolific and influential authors, Paper Cuts is further confirmation that Colin Bateman is becoming one of our most ambitious writers too. Deliciously readable, timely in its themes and surprisingly optimistic about the future of local journalism, it deserves to be ranked among his most polished offerings. ~ Declan Burke
This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.
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