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Faith And Duty - Book Review
It seemed like a good idea at the time I started reading the book to post a review of it on Everything Ulster, being that it's content is relevant to the situation here in Northern Ireland and all. Of course on finishing the book I remembered I hadn't a clue about literature - d'oh!! Well here goes anyway.
Nick Curtis's "Faith and Duty: The True Story of a Soldier's War in Northern Ireland" (available online from Amazon) tells the story of the author, a British soldier sent to Northern Ireland in the late 60s. It's very easy to look at a soldier and see just a soldier, but one of the most striking things about this book is that as Curtis describes what's going through his mind as he faces that mob in the streets of Ardoyne, roofslates flying at his head, or as he wonders if he's been sussed in a Republican bar in Armagh, it reminds the reader that these are just people like everyone else, who often act act just like anyone else would.
Curtis, raised a Catholic, came into Northern Ireland feeling a lot of sympathy with the demands for civil rights. What he saw here though, would bring him to question that faith in a way he surely couldn't have predicted. The point is that this is not a book written by a willing servant of some colonial overlord, but of a man trying to do a difficult job - that of keeping two warring tribes apart. Even though he empathised with his co-religionists in their demands for civil rights, Curtis tells how he was to be shocked by the callousness of the republican movement. Early in the book Curtis describes a small group of men directing youths as they rioted in Ardoyne, others setting of bangers hoping the soldiers would 'return' fire and maybe even (if they were lucky) injure someone. Later he would describe finding the body of a man beaten and tortured by the IRA, almost beyond recognition.
Yet in the midst of the carnage he somehow manages to keep his sense of humour (something many of those who have lived through the worst of the troubles seem to do quite well), not least when he describes being locked in a closet enduring the sound of a drunken, fat couple having sex. It's these brief light interludes in the otherwise disturbing descriptions of life here that keep the reader from becoming too bogged down, and maybe that's why it's so hard to put down.
Through the course of the book, Curtis tells of dealing with street battles as a soldier, working undercover as an intelligence operative, an excursion with the SAS, meeting with Bernadette McAlliskey to discuss her safety, being awarded a Military Medal by the Queen and far too much else to list it all here.
As I said, I don't know a lot about literature, but I know a book's good when someone like me who nearly never reads novels keeps telling myself "just one more chapter". Buy it.