Peter Hanington - A Single Source

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Rather disappointing

I was rather disappointed in A Single Source. I enjoyed A Dying Breed very much, but I didn’t think this was nearly so well done.

Patrick Hanington uses his two protagonists, an old-school BBC radio reporter and his young producer, to illustrate some of what happened in the Arab Spring in 2011 and also to analyse what the refugee/migrant “crisis” really means for those making their dangerous, sometimes horrific journeys. He writes from the heart and with genuine knowledge, and these are very important matters – but I’m afraid it doesn’t make a very good novel.

I found the fractured structure of the book rather irritating as it cuts between two stories and then between viewpoints within the stories, which broke up any sense of flow or development. To make this worse, Hanington’s style is a bit plodding, with rather stolidly described characters and situations. He also does what he managed largely to avoid in his first book, which is to go in for too much worthy journalistic exposition at the expense of the story. There is a balance to be struck between these things and for me he doesn’t get it right here. It’s a hazard for journalists, even very good journalists, when they write novels; I felt the same about Holly Watt’s To The Lions, for example. Others manage it very well (Terry Stiastny springs to mind) and so did Hanington last time, but this was a struggle for me and I can’t really recommend it.

(My thanks to John Murray for an ARC via NetGalley.)