In Injury Time we meet Fenton Conville, a married businessman teetering on the edge of 50 and unhappy in the face of this looming event. Fenton inhabits a sleekly expensive house with wide windows overlooking Belfast Lough. He is well-to-do, or so his neighbours – and his own family – assume, but we soon learn that Fenton’s business is in retreat: it is 2017 and the punters are no longer so keen on his skin-blasting sunbeds.
Entrepreneurial Fenton, however, generates his own opportunities. He decides to diversify into vaping: he samples a lemon meringue pie-flavoured vape in the name of research, and likes it. Yes, surely a new vaping empire will keep an enormous mortgage just about serviced, and the bank at bay.
If only business – and life – were so straightforward.
Kevin Smith’s engrossing and supremely witty new novel focuses on the specific: on a particular stratum of society and on a particular moment in the life of Northern Ireland. Fenton Conville is embedded in the affluent world of north Co Down – a Protestant world of generational wealth and no little ostentation – and his circle is just beginning to digest the potential impact of Brexit upon its lifestyle, not to mention its constitutional future.
Fenton – a marvellous and all-too-recognisable creation, a potent mingling of ferocious comedy with profound tragedy – has managed to surf through life until this point: but now, just as age begins to diminish his energies, so forces are mustering against him: loans must be repaid; long-ago acts of greed, selfishness and dishonour must be accounted for; and in this moment of need, Fenton realises he has few friends, even fewer allies, and a great many enemies.
Smith gathers a large cast around Fenton – family, business associates, former lovers, violent gangsters, hateful teenagers and more – and these myriad figures play their parts well, together encapsulating the complexities that lie below the surface of this ostensibly complacent middle-class unionist society: its silent fears, its ever-diminishing economic and political clout within Northern Ireland and its inexorably eroding faith in the future as the next generation leaves this “wee Ulster”, seldom to return. In Fenton and his community, Smith has given us a poignant study of masculinity – and a penetrating portrait of a world under tremendous strain.
