Bongo Fury Novella Collection, by Simon Maltman

[This book was provided free of charge by the author.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

As someone who has read quite a lot from the author [1], including the first two of the three novellas included in collection, I was quite happy to read this complete set of the Bongo Fury trilogy, even if I did not get to it nearly as quickly as I thought I would.  At any rate, this collection of novellas is a satisfying one that tells an intriguing story that fits well within the author’s Belfast noir wheelhouse, showing at its core a man who blends interests in music as a small business owner of the titular Bongo Fury store as well as an interest in crime that leads him into trouble as he sticks up for friends and finds himself involved in matters that are way above his paygrade.  As far as antiheroes go, Jim is an appealing one, one with some curiosity as well as resourcefulness and some skill in getting out of the trouble that he finds himself in.  There are probably at least a few readers who find themselves not to be terribly unlike Jim with a readiness to commit violence and a high interest in drinking and stirring up trouble every now and then.

The novella collection includes three novellas.  The first is Bongo Fury, which shows Jim seeking to find and rescue his friend Stevie.  This task is not as straightforward as it first may appear, as Jim’s efforts to investigate the matter lead him first to antagonize a local crime boss who sends some thugs to smash his shop and then leads him to a different crime figure who has actually kidnapped Stevie, who is then rescued while more smashing of shops and tossing of Molotov cocktails occurs.  The second novella is Bongo Fury 2:  Holiday For Skins, where Jim is pressured by a couple of cops, one of them very corrupt and violent, that he needs to help them stop a serial killer or go to jail for some minor drug offenses, and he ends up finding out that his own brother has been doing a lot of politically motivated killings as a way of improving his own position.  Finally, the collection ends with Bongo Fury 3:  Dancing Madly Backwards, where Jim finds himself asked to find a man who had been killed in flagrante in a rape forty years ago (a connection with the shared universe of the author’s works) and finds his shop burned down by some bad people looking for his brother, and after his family is threatened, decides to start a new life.

As a whole the collection is a satisfying one, showing Jim progress through petty violence to a determination to leave Belfast and its violence behind and start anew somewhere else.  In a very compelling way the author shows the corruption in Belfast that is not only connected to the years (generations even) of sectarian violence but also demonstrates how crime and violence becomes embedded in societies.  Jim is a man that many can identify with–his fondness for weed and alcohol are fairly common nowadays, his taste in music is classic, both obscure and mainstream, and he has a strong sense of honor and loyalty that is nonetheless tested by is complex circumstances.  Throughout the course of the novella series we see that violence for its own sake tends to have complicated circumstances, and that one can feel a great deal of compassion for even serial murderers, and see the way that people twist in the search for peace of mind and freedom.  The author presents a Belfast that has beauty to it but also a dark past that it has not, and perhaps even cannot, completely overcome, and that is an oppressively small world with dark secrets.  It sounds like a city to return to over and over again for the author’s fiction as well.

[1] See, for example:

Book Review: A Chaser On The Rocks

Book Review: A Kill For The Poet

Book Review: The Sidewinder

Book Review: Bongo Fury

Book Review: Bongo Fury 2: Holiday For Skins