A novel born of shame and pride

Alan Gibbons

Alan Gibbons on how the darker side of two great cities - Manchester and Liverpool - helped inspire his latest novel, Raining Fire

Two great cities made me. One was Manchester where I lived as a young man. The other is Liverpool where I live now. For all their crackling rivalry, the North West’s two great cities have so much in common. There is a heritage of docks and industry, of dereliction and adversity, of football and the echoes of Ireland, of decline and resurrection. I love their vitality, their humour, their prickly rebelliousness. In the last decade I have also had cause to peer into their darker side.

Young men with too much time on their hands and too little purpose have on occasion brought shame to each of my warring sister cities, first with knives and then with guns. Thankfully, gun crime in Britain is rare. There is nothing like the mayhem wrought on the streets of the United States, Rio or Jo’burg, but tragedies do occur.

In August 2007 eleven-year-old Rhys Jones was on his way home from football practice. As he crossed a pub car park Sean Mercer, just seven years older than the boy he killed, appeared on a mountain bike. He opened fire with a handgun and an innocent boy lost his life in a senseless killing. The murder shocked Liverpool.

Just four years later Greater Manchester had its own tragedy to mourn. Anuj Bidve was a successful young man, studying for a Master of Science degree. He was out with friends in Salford when Kiaran Stapleton approached and shot him dead in another futile act of violence.

There is a chilling similarity between the two slayings. They involved disturbed young men with a casual disregard for human life who took the lives of innocents with hopes, dreams and aspirations that would never be fulfilled. It is easy to slip into a sense of numb despair when something like this happens, to shake your head and murmur gratefully: there but for fortune go you or go I.

Writers however have a duty to explore all areas of human experience, no matter how shocking and bleak their material. It is easy to be preachy when it comes to the subject of guns, but I didn’t want to lecture my readers, let alone be hubristic enough to say I had any answers, but I did feel the need to bring the issues out in the open, to air possible explanations. That meant using character, voice and place to explore the roots of such violence.

My Liverpool and my Manchester are resurgent places, rising like the phoenix from the ashes of deindustrialisation, but many youngsters are left behind in the rush for redevelopment. The city in Raining Fire is unnamed, an amalgam of both cities. I wanted my characters to walk the streets of a northern everytown. I know the estates I describe, soulless places far from the glitz and buzz of Salford Quays or Liverpool One.  This is where Ethan and his brother hang out. This is where they come under the influence of gang-leader Mattie Leather. He gives them an identity. He gives them a sense of belonging. He gives them the gun. This is how the novel opens:

The gun is power.

The gun can make a weak man strong. The gun is the coward’s fist. It has no moral conscience, no will of its own. It can destroy close up or at distance. The gunman can choose to look into the eyes of his victim or avoid the stare of the dying. The gunman doesn’t have to feel the intimacy of death. The kill is the perfect remote act. It combines computer game morality and a fatal bullet. A shot to the head. A shot to the heart. Either way the gun delivers.

Every time.

It does its job.

Every time.

I imagined Sean Mercer and Kiaran Stapleton’s journey to the Croxteth car park, the Salford street where they killed. I made my characters retrace Mercer and Stapleton’s steps among the boarded up shops, the homogenised retail parks and derelict factory units. They became my Mattie, Ethan and Alex the boys who came under his influence. I poked my narrative camera into the hooded youths huddled on the street corners. Raining Fire is what I discovered.

Raining Fire is published by Indigo. Read our review