Robin Bryans
Honeyford Press, 58 Argyle Road, London W13 8AA
£9.75.
I first came across Mr Bryans when, under his other pen name, Robert Harbinson, he became embroiled in the Kincora Boys Home aspect of the Colin Wallace affair in 1987 and 88. As Harbinson, he began including me on his distribution list for a series of ‘open letters’. Though obviously highly libellous, the content of these letters was largely obscure to me — and to the other people I knew who were getting them — but they seemed to indicate that the author knew a good deal about a number of scandals connected to Northern Ireland, including the Kincora Boys Home. Unfortunately, precisely what he knew, and precisely what he was willing to say in public was never made clear. Eventually Harbinson/Bryans and I appeared on the same edition of the tv programme After Dark on which he was as gnomic and obscure as his letters. The last contact I had with him was in 1990 when I met a journalist who was supposed to be working with him on a book. He was toting round the country an enormous typewritten manuscript by Harbinson/Bryans which I had flipped through in about 10 minutes. This book, I guess, is that manuscript — or its first cousin — finally in print.
This is 623 pages, jumbled, unedited (or badly edited), and frequently virtually incomprehensible; but it is also dotted with interesting fragments. It is supposed to be an autobiography, and it is in a way. But the directly autobiographical material is mostly obliterated by rambling, digressive accounts of feuding in the social circles that writer Harbinson/Bryans has lived in since the war. Since those circles included Anthony Blunt and an upper class Anglo-Irish homosexual mafia, this essentially private memoir has wider resonances. There are tidbits in here on issues as diverse as Rudolf Hess in Britain, the peace plots of 1940, and black magic circles in South Wales (those three all linked together, incidentally); Blunt and Burgess; Labour Party politicians, war-time diplomacy and the sexual habits of Mrs Simpson and a great many others; the rise of Ian Paisley, Kincora and John McKeague etc. This is score settling on a grand scale.
Since most of this book concerns people I know nothing about my evaluation of it should be taken as tentative; but on first reading I suspect this is one of the great scurrilous memoirs of the age and I think you’d better buy a copy before it gets injuncted and disappears.