Review: Sync by Dan Tyte

Niall Griffiths

So you get past the introductory chapters of Dan Tyte’s new novel and you take a breather and a recap and take stock of what you’ve been given:

The aftermath of a road traffic accident where ‘in the gutter lay a man…his form thrown around the floor [,] red blood connect[ing] his head to the drain’.

Sadie, and a register of the men she’s of late been involved with, including her well-meaning but insipidly dull husband Graham, whose ‘small cock [going] in and out like an indecisive house guest’ is interrupting her reflections on a past flame called Luke, met at the 2003 anti-war march.

Ysabelle, an Italian living in Buenos Aires. Spanglish. Spooky superstitions passed down through the generations on the distaff side. References to several deaths and visions of portent.

Nina. Cardiff. Looking back at her recent partners, one Luke being her favourite.

Charlie. A musician post-fame, but still acclaimed, still respected. Now living a vicarious online existence (mostly). Once labelled ‘the new Joni Mitchell’.

DC Graves. At the scene of the opening RTA. Victim identified; a record of political agitation. Graves frequents online dating sites when not doing Detective Constable stuff.

Stage set 

So that’s what we have; this is the stage set, the cast given, the thematics touched on. We have strong characterisation and feel for individual voice. The experiences of women and the iniquities of men. Links foreshadowed and suggested.

And what we really and also have, in structural scaffolding and the machinery of narrative, is a powerful and compelling opening, complicated material in competent hands, and the warm knowledge that you’ve embarked on what is going to be a rich and rewarding reading experience.

You’re enjoying this, you think. This is going to be good.

And, yes, it is. The strength of the opening is sustained throughout, with skilled pacing, well-situated mines of revelation and narrative linkings transparently made; nothing is obtrusive, none of it feels forced. It flows.

Frustrated

We soon learn that Sadie, bored of ‘middle-England mediocrity’, is a managing director for an artisan ice-cream company called Mooments Organic and is simmering with a kind of frustrated cynicism which prompts her to fondly recall the livelier and more meaningful moments spent at Liverpool university with a charismatic political activist called Luke.

And we see Ysabelle flashbacking to her time as a waitress in a bar and forming a bond with a Welsh customer, the connective tissue being Tom Jones (of course).

This customer was, yes, a charismatic political activist called Luke. No longer a student, however; he’s an investigative journalist when he encounters Ysabelle.

So this book unfurls, patiently, slowly, and with a deep, intuitive understanding of how storytelling works (or should work, rather).

All voices carry and convince (altho Ysabelle’s Spanglish occasionally comes across as caricatured and like something out of The Fast Show: I mean, for example, ‘within dos minutos’? Really?).

Cliffhanger

Tyte’s appreciation of the ‘cliffhanger’ ensures the pages keep turning. Luke, comatose in a hospital in the overarching timeline, is reanimated through recall and revealed association and so becomes a catalyst for a study of globalisation on the micro level: he brings bits of Argentina to Nina, for instance, of which country she knows nothing except ‘not to cry for it, but he looks like he’s about to’.

This stuff entices and intrigues. The minutiae of the characters’ lives are depicted with sensitivity and skill.

Tyte has evidently done his research and knows instinctively how to utilise an empathetic imagination.

You’ll probably guess, quickly and correctly, that political skullduggery borne from rapacity lies behind the opening RTA/assassination attempt but that doesn’t matter, not when seemingly casual, throwaway comments resonate with meaning: ‘In Cupid’s grand romantic stakes, sending a DM from the safety of a mobile phone might not quite rank as highly as yomping across the windswept moors but in that moment, it was the best I had’.

So we need new tropes. How extensively the realm online has altered this one of meat and bone.

Maverick copper

There is a problem with the Graves character, I feel, a Detective who goes by the book in that he doesn’t play by the book; the maverick copper, overweight, world-weary, drink-weak, cynical, estranged from his wife and kid, and other clichés (the self-aware references to Cracker etc don’t really mitigate this).

But he is an important link in the novel and as such he is a necessary ingredient; would that he had been drawn with similar originality to the rest of the cast, tho.

I could heap more praise on this absorbing book but space constrains.

Even the slight anti-climax of the denouement is deft; no grand explosion, no shattering revelation of world-splitting exposure, just more corporate venality and greed and carelessness and harm.

All human good sacrificed to the gods of profit.

With his evident respect for and profound knowledge of the incredible richness of human lives, Tyte illustrates again (and it cannot be illustrated enough) what an appalling crime this is.

Sync is available in paperback and Kindle here.