Metal Mountain, The

John Healy is a writer of novels, plays and an award-winning autobiography, The Grass Arena. He was born in 1942, of an Irish family in North London. John Healy spent fifteen violent, destitute years living rough at a time when begging carried an automatic prison sentence. He became a chess Grand Master. In 1986 he wrote his 'savage masterpiece' The Grass Arena (now a Penguin Modern Classic), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize in 1989 for autobiography. Streets Above Us, his first novel, was published in 1990. THE METAL MOUNTAIN is John Healy's second novel, published 30 years after The Grass Arena. London is a city of ruins and rubble: in fighting against a police state Britain has become almost a police state itself. Rationing is still in place, the black market is thriving, medical shortages have resulted in antibiotics being watered down. Though Britain was possessed of great decency there was a limit to what it might be expected to bear after suffering six years of war. The barbarities of war had changed peoples' attitudes; nobody thought of foreigners in terms of human beings. The Salvation Army were singing of salvation while the kids on the street were singing saucy songs about inn keepers' daughters and German officers that had crossed the line. New arrival seventeen-year old Bridget Kelly dreams of a world where everyone is equal. "There is no cause more dangerous" warns one council official as she sets about the task of trying to make her dream come true. She is courageous and determined and in terrible danger. Her young nephew Michael schemes and plots to win the metal mountain, a gothic edifice, a treacherous Hades, a fabulous kingdom of iron. Meanwhile, his young aunt has come under the scrutiny of the British secret police. Blackmail, betrayal and murder follow. A perverse grand tragedy with an edge of iron.