Vagabond - Gerald Seymour

Back in the old days...

Why would Gerald Seymour want to go back now to the setting of his first major success as a writer, Harry's Game? Things are very different in Northern Ireland in the years since the beginning of the peace-process. It's not like it was in the past. This however is precisely what Vagabond is about and it's cleverly set-up in the opening prologue, which takes a terrorist incident back in the bad old days in Co. Tyrone and looks at it through fresh, more politically accountable eyes. Things have changed, but not necessarily for the better, particularly when those issues now have to considered in a wider global, political and commercial context.

For Seymour, it's a good opportunity to consider the relative morality of how we view military, terrorist and counter-terrorist actions then and now (specifically in the handling of agents, informers or 'touts' as they are better known), but typically, Seymour is now able to take a wider perspective that recognises that there are vast global implications and repercussions to freedom fighting and arms dealing. Business interests, political interests and personal interests that expose human weaknesses, motivations and behaviours, all have a major part to play in the reality on the ground, and Seymour is at his best here blending them all together towards a typically explosive and confrontational finale.

The old-school motivation of revenge is, not unexpectedly, the driving force that brings events past and present to such a conclusion. 'Desperate' Daniel Curnow, a former agent-handler in N. Ireland known as Vagabond, is brought out of self-imposed retirement by MI5 to oversee an arms deal going down in Prague. It's being brokered by one of their informers, a dodgy cigarette smuggler for continuity terrorists in Northern Ireland, one of whom is the son of an IRA operative that Dan was once involved in 'eliminating' in an old-style covert operation. The arms deal however involves a former Soviet Bloc 'entrepreneur' - former operatives in central Europe also now having to adjust to a new style of business where adjustments have to be made for those wishing to earn a living from war, conflict and oppression. 

Seymour weaves these competing sentiments and issues together with consummate skill and awareness for the bigger picture and its wider implications. Some threads would appear to be incidental and irrelevant (a typical complaint about Seymour's writing), but even side matters like tourists visiting the graveyards of Normandy tie in modern attitudes towards armed struggles and past conflicts. There's nothing flabby at all about the author's writing, which can be subtly poetic and bluntly hard-edged at the same time. The closing report into the operation is chillingly blunt about the outcome, but Seymour authentically and with precision lays bare personality traits, explores motivations, provides understanding into the mindset of players in a bigger and more dangerous game than you could ever imagine. This is the way the world of covert intelligence operates, this is what makes human beings tick and yet again Seymour brilliantly, insightfully and thrillingly shows you the dangerous and brutal reality.