THE Headbanger of the title of this novel is, in his own words "the Dublin Dirty Harry", a tough, aggressive garda who is determined to put a gang of powerful Dublin criminals and its boss, Drummer Cunningham, behind bars. But Garda Pat Coyne is also a bookish type who observes his fellow humans through a detached, anthropological eye; a family man who is driven by his intense loyalty to his three young children and his wife Carmel.
His many qualities - he is also capable of deriving intense satisfaction from having stand up sex with Cunningham's moll Naomi in a seedy alley - end up stretching our credulity to breaking point. But then, this novel is not intended to be taken too seriously.
It is a new departure for Hamilton, whose first three novels were set in Germany, his mother's birthplace, and which were marked by his impressively elegant and seamless descriptive powers. Some of this elegance persists in Headbanger - "Naomi with a belly button that swivelled and swung like a hypnotist's watch" - but it sits uneasily alongside Hamilton's images of grotty Dublin streets steaming with dog droppings and "bonehead" gangsters.
In an earlier, more "literary" novel, Surrogate City (set in Berlin), Hamilton played cleverly with the concept of the surrogate on several levels. In Headbanger, which mostly reads like a TV crime movie, he also includes a meditation on a theme, this time the idea of territorial tribalism and how it manifests itself in ways that do not change from century to century, or indeed from species to species: "That's how all that art and culture began in the first place. This tribe of people where all the men go out together to have a communal crap .. . We're all a bunch of civilised shitters when it comes down to it, each one of us proclaiming our identity, marking our space in the world through waste."
This theme heralds a barrage of descriptions of ritualistic excretion that encrust the novel, from Drummer Cunningham throwing litter on the streets as if to say: "This is my city ... I'll throw my shite around if I like" to Coyne urinating on Cunningham's car, to, unbelievably, a pun on "Don Quixote" and "donkey shite". All these cloacal references are far too numerous for my taste.
There is some satisfying satire: "The dance floor was momentarily packed for `Let's talk about sex, baby', as though it was a new national anthem for a united Ireland. Exploratory talks that everybody could agree on." There are some evocative, memorably written passages, such as the chilling account of how Coyne's father is killed by stings from his own bees.
But Coyne remains a mixture of uneasy collisions, from Neanderthal cop ("make my day, you gobshite"), to sophisticated reader of Shakespeare and amateur philosopher: "What was it in music that caused such democratic epilepsy?" Part of the problem is the shifting narrative perspective. Most of the time we see things from Coyne's point of view, but there are occasions when Coyne is not there such as when Carmel is abducted by Cunningham's gang and forced to do an Irish dancing solo in Phoenix Park (these tribal rituals include the women dancing, see). Suddenly we see things through Carmel's eyes, but that laboured anthropological perspective which we know to be Coyne's persists: "The dance of servility and introversion. Of chastity and repressed liberty."
Meanwhile, although we are expected to see Coyne as a man who is capable of both extreme crudity and extreme sensitivity, the gangsters are described in terms of wearying predictability. They have faces which are compared to slashed bus seats, dart boards and hub cabs. Naomi could have stepped out of any B movie, except that, bizarrely, she steps out of her knickers "like she would step out of a currach". Coyne also is allowed his memories of school holidays on the Aran Islands and hurling at school with the mandatory sadistic Christian Brother.
And yet, I was curiously glad that Coyne survives, in a typically unrealistic reprieve after the predictable car chase with Cunningham et al. I have a feeling that we have not heard the last of Coyne, with his paranoia, bad language and tortured theories of life. I predict a sequel, and a TV series. Watch this space.