The description in her book tells us also that she worked ‘in car body repairs, in the best fish and chip shop in Brighton, and as a gofer in a comedy club.’ And now her novel, Sea of Bones, is out, published by Agenda Press on 1 July, and it’s a humdinger that starts with a terrible event.

Suicide is always a shock for those who knew the victim. Such ghastly events can also trigger waves of guilt. (Could I have done more? Why didn’t s/he speak to me?) And disbelief. O’Donoghue (full disclosure; she is a fellow – and prolific – contributor to Brussels Express) skilfully and plausibly evokes such sentiments, leading her protagonist into an increasingly dark and desperate world. In what is part-psycho drama, part thriller, part noir detective novel, Sea of Bones takes the reader from the incestuous rivalry of politics in London to the enigmatic Moray Firth coast and on to the sleazy cocaine-smudged underbelly of the Manchester club scene.

Juliet MacGillivray is chief of staff to Fiona Goldman, radical feminist leader of the Progressive Alliance. Following a press exposé, Goldman’s career nosedives and, after an electoral disaster for the Alliance, speculation grows that MacGillivray will replace her. Juliet’s thoughts, however, are elsewhere, following the apparent suicide through drowning of her favourite niece, Beth, off the Moray Firth. On trips up to Inverness for the funeral and to empty the summer house on the coast where Beth had been staying, MacGillivray’s guilt (because of unavailability through her intensive politicking in London) and doubts (because Beth’s behaviour was so unlike the young woman that Juliet thought she knew) get the better of her and, aided and abetted by her photographer husband, Declan Byrne, she starts to dig and the story suddenly rockets off… To go further would be to give away a sophisticated plot that takes a number of shocking turns (that at first sight seem unexpected but are cleverly pre-figured in the text) and which ultimately brings the reader back to the ‘Sea of Bones’ in the title (the Moray Firth) where, Juliet discovers, everything began and everything ended in ways she simply could never have imagined.

Sea of Bones is richly atmospheric. O’Donoghue gives a great sense of place. Her characters are closely observed and the whole story simmers and blurs, like the mists and fogs of Manchester and the Firth – and like the mental illness that runs in the MacGillivray family. The novel is larded with wonderful turns of phrase. A girl stabs her toe into the water ‘like a bird prodding a snake.’ Trees whisper between themselves. Nightclub bouncers ‘drizzle’ polite remarks over VIP guests. A politician’s proffered hand is ‘a sinewy, liver-spotted wedge of flesh.’ And syncopated footsteps are like ‘Frank Sinatra keeping his own time.’

And what about Brussels and the Belga in all this? ‘Well, obviously, it’s not set in Brussels,’ says O’Donoghue. ‘There are aspects of the plot that I think apply to most countries; high-level corruption, the symbiotic relationship between the entertainment and the news industries. But it’s also about the basic human instincts; love, loyalty, ambition, perversion…’ And the characters? ‘No one in the novel is based on one person,’ says O’Donoghue, ‘but some locals might recognise aspects of themselves.’ Like many writers, O’Donoghue is a magpie, collecting the more striking aspects of the people she observes. ‘Some of the bar staff at the Belga have fantastic tattoos,’ she says, ‘and I was inspired by them when writing one of my characters.’

As to her protagonist, Juliet MacGillivray starts with doubt and disbelief and ends with certainty and knowledge, leaving the reader to wonder which was the better. If you haven’t yet packed your suitcase for the beach or the pool, be sure to pop this novel in. And if, when you get back, you happen to see a striking, dark-haired lady at the Belga tapping into her computer, that will be Deborah O’Donoghue, hard at work on her second novel.

Paperback published by Legend Press, 1 July 2019

The post Debut thriller from a Brussels-based author: Sea of Bones by Deborah O’Donoghue appeared first on Brussels Express.

For this is the non-country of Noël Godin, the cream pie thrower (‘l’entarteur’), who counts Marguerite Duras, Maurice Béjart, Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernard-Henri Levy and Bill Gates among his high-profile victims (and whose memoirs are entitled Cream and Punishment). This is the non-country of anarchist film maker Jan Bucquoy, who in 2009 opened the Underwear Museum (Le Musée du Slip, initially located in Brussels, but now in Lessines), declaring, with a mostly straight face, that the framed underwear represented a utopian longing for an equal society.

Perhaps my student status granted me entry to a particular world, but I found the Brussels and Belgium of the early 1980s to be a fascinating hotch-potch of ideologies and political leanings. These ranged from libertarian anarchists to anarcho-syndicalists, from Maoists to Trotskyists. Many of these encounters would come at beer and wine-fueled parties in residences sécondaires (second homes) in far-flung parts of the Belgian countryside, belying the bourgeois lifestyle that permitted them the luxury of their exotic politics – though it was considered bad form to point to the irony. These barbecue parties – do they still happen, I wonder? – were invariably along the lines of ‘bring your own brochette and beer’ and would peter out into small hour discussions about ‘serious matters’. I recall one young man whose parents had, he explained, long ago emigrated to (Francoist) Spain. Somebody later told me they had followed Degrelle before the war and ‘collaborated’ during it, and that their emigration was actually an exile. At the other extreme, I met fierce Greek communists, whose parents had fled the Colonels and didn’t yet feel they could return.

In similar parties in the mid-1980s I met several times ‘Babar’ (real name Roger Noël), a celebrity after his July 1982 arrest and imprisonment in Jaruzelski’s Poland, after trying to smuggle radios and other material to the underground trade union movement, Solidarnosc. Wiki describes him as a militant libertarian socialist, though in those days Babar was also close to the anarchist movement. Babar, who had a pleasant character and a great enthusiasm for music of the 1950s and 1960s, ran a printing press, the 22 March press. For a long time, his press was on the ground floor of a house in the rue de Pavie. On hot summer nights he would keep the door open and passers-by could see him and hear the clack-clack of the press. This took a certain courage; in July 1981 the headquarters of the radical left-wing journal, Pour, with which Babar had been associated, was burned down by presumed far right terrorists.

Indeed, there was not just a heady atmosphere in 1980s Belgium; there was a violent one. First, anti-Semitism reared its ugly head. On 28 July 1980 in Antwerp a Syrian-born terrorist launched a grenade attack on a group of forty Jewish children waiting with their parents for a bus to their summer camp. A fifteen year-old boy was killed. Twenty others were wounded. On 20 October 1981 the synagogue in Antwerp was bombed. And the Irish Troubles had soon made their way to Belgium. There were several IRA bomb and gun attacks in 1979, culminating in a 29 August bomb attack on British soldiers in the Grand Place, injuring fifteen. In November the same year the Irish National Liberation Army bombed the British consulate in Antwerp.

On 3 December 1980, two bullets fired from a passing car narrowly missed then British European Commissioner Christopher Tugendhat. The Provisional IRA claimed responsibility. There were sporadic IRA attacks on British soldiers on the Continent, culminating on 12 August 1988, when a British Army Sergeant-Major, Richard Heakin, was shot dead in his car on the main road into Ostend. He was on his way to the cross-Channel ferry and, like all British forces on the Rhine in those days, was driving a car with the special BA number plates that made them easy targets for IRA terrorists (the plates were discontinued as a result).

But the anarchical ideological headiness I had sensed also spilled over into extraordinary violence. From 1982 till 1985 a gang with a core of three ruthless and fearless men embarked on a notoriously murderous crime spree. In eighteen attacks, mainly centred on supermarkets in Belgian Brabant, the ‘Giant’, the ‘Killer’ and the ‘Old Man’, altogether killed 28 innocent people and injured another 40. The whimsical attacks of the ‘Brabant killers’ (‘Les tueurs de Brabant-Wallon’) were completely unpredictable, seemed motiveless and have never been solved. Links to the Belgian ‘stay-behind’ (the so-called ‘Gladio’ – a shady pan-European initiative involving caches of arms and money to facilitate subversive activities in the event that countries were over-run by Communism) network were rumoured but never proven.

Many people believed the attacks to be the work of the extreme-right, seeking to destabilise Belgian society. In the same period, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organisation, the Communist Combatant Cells (Cellules Communistes Combattantes), carried out 28 bomb and other attacks on perceived enemies of Communism, including NATO, American and other international businesses, and the Federation of Belgian Enterprises. Meanwhile, on 20 April 1985 the Front Révolutionnaire d’Action Prolétarienne (FRAP) bombed the North Atlantic Assembly’s headquarters in the rue Des Six Jeunes Hommes, just off the Petit Sablon. Nobody had heard of the FRAP, which was later discovered to be a CCC splinter movement.

Any sneaking sense of sympathy or even admiration for the ‘cheeky’ CCC was snuffed out at midnight on 1 May 1985. Two CCC activists parked a van outside the headquarters of the Federation of Belgian Enterprises in the rue des Sols in the centre of Brussels. The police were warned, and a leaflet distributed. A passer-by, seeing smoke rising from the van, called the Fire Service. Two firefighters were killed when a massive bomb exploded as they were trying to put out the suspected fire. Fourteen others were injured. Massive material damage was done to surrounding buildings, including the one then hosting the EU’s Economic and Social Committee. Unlike the tueurs de Brabant-Wallon the CCC and FRAP terrorists were caught and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences. The CCC’s mastermind, Pierre Carette, was released, unrepentant, in 2003. Bizarrely, he was allowed to debate his actions on the Belgian VRT television channel with Wilfried Martens, who had been Prime Minister in 1985. Only in Belgium!

Speaking thirty years after the rue des Sols attack, Jean-Jacques Jespers, who had been the RTBF’s point man on its televised news journal that day, described how, ‘there was an extraordinary atmosphere of terror because, at the same time (as the CCC) there were the Brabant killers. There was the impression that Belgium was the centre of a sort of important agitation, because it hosted NATO’s headquarters, and so on. There had been several attacks before, so there was a febrile atmosphere.’

To come back to the newcomer’s question (‘where did that come from?’), the answer is that the inspiration for the witty, charismatic serial killer played by Benoît Poelvoorde in Man Bites Dog almost certainly came in part from the Brabant killers’ apparently random acts of extreme violence. More generally, it surely came from the anarchic atmosphere which is hard to imagine nowadays but was often felt in Belgium in the 1980s.

The post A country in foment: Belgium in the 1980s appeared first on Brussels Express.

A big part of the problem was that for decades the Brussels region (as it would become) had no local government; after various constitutional reforms, the first regional elections would finally take place only in June 1989. Another part of the problem was the latitude given to grandiose architectural and urban schemes, fuelled by unrestrained speculators, inspired, after Expo ’58, by a vague concept of ‘America’ (until recently the policiers-motards still rode classic Harley Davidsons) and wholly devoted to the automobile. Various motorway schemes led in turn to an emptying-out of Brussels, which meant that few really cared about or for the city’s architectural heritage.

So it was that until 1990 the city’s greatest jewel, the Grand Place, served as a car park and through road, and the neo-classical splendours arranged harmoniously around the Place des Martyrs were allowed to fester until only the façades could be saved. Where else could such an ugly building as the Philips Tower be built opposite the eclectic beauty of the La Monnaie opera house? In what other city would Victor Horta’s Maison du Peuple be wantonly demolished and replaced by the twenty-six floor Blaton tower – seemingly a deliberately bland concrete monstrosity? Vast holes yawned beside the rue de la Loi (where the Justus Lipsius building now looms) and in front of the Gare Centrale (where the Hilton Hotel now greets the visitor). In the early 1980s, the rue Joseph II and the Avenue de Cortenbergh were still mainly lined with stucco-façaded patrician town houses from the belle époque. The owners of many of these houses – there and elsewhere – punched holes in the roofs to let the rain in and speed up the process of decay that would enable them to be demolished and make way for speculative construction.

Brussels had always been blasé about its architectural heritage: the Palais de Justice deliberately crushed the life out of the popular Marolles district; the cut-and-cover method used to build the railway Jonction between the Gare du Midi and the Gare du Nord wiped away swathes of the mediaeval city; the city walls were demolished essentially to make way for the mini-motorway of the petite ceinture; the over-ambitious World Trade Center obliterated the popular quarters behind the Gare du Nord; indeed, the process I was witnessing, as I wandered around the city on foot, had a name; ‘Brusselization’ (“the indiscriminate and careless introduction of modern high-rise buildings” and “haphazard urban development and redevelopment” – Wiki). The more I wandered, the more I got an impression of decadence and decay. The First and the Second World Wars had left the city largely untouched, but now it seemed to be devouring itself, like an urban version of necrotising fasciitis.

There was another notorious phenomenon, though it wasn’t restricted to Brussels; les travaux inutiles (literally, useless works). Most of these came about through unrealised heady ambitions, mostly to do with cars (metro projects were another rich source of useless works). Anybody driving into Brussels can see where the motorways were, at one stage, supposed to have gone: namely, all the way into the city centre (they would have met up somewhere around Place St Josse). If the planners had had their way, the car was going to take over the ground, and pedestrians would henceforth walk along elevated platforms. Look again at the ‘apron’ about a quarter of the way up the Philips Tower; that was going to be the new pedestrian zone. The pedestrian bridge that used to stretch from the Cité administrative over the Botanique end of the Boulevard Pachéco was another vestige of that brave new world. Who now remembers the motorway viaduct that spanned the Boulevard Léopold II, from Boulevard Emile Jacqumain to Boulevard Roi Albert II?; another Expo ’58 folly, erected to worship the automobile god, and finally demolished in 1984 (though part of it was recycled as the down ramp at the entrance to the Belliard tunnel). From the belly of the Berlaymont officials could drive directly onto the motorway, and on to Paris or Bonn. Indeed, only one traffic light, at Notre Dame de Bonne Odeur (long since suppressed), stood between Paris and Bonn.

Brussels has undoubtedly got much better. The speculators are still there. There is still too much ‘façadisation’ (another maladie, where old buildings are gutted and only the façade is retained). But there is a sense of order and control in the city now – thanks in large part to local government. The car is no longer an omnipotent god. From an urban point of view, Brussels may be battered and bruised, but it is no longer a whited sepulchre.

The post How did Brussels look in the early 1980’s? appeared first on Brussels Express.