This is a debut novel by a Scottish author which was published in 2007 by independe
nt publishers Two Ravens Press.
The plot is set against the real events of the Bologna massacre (’strage di Bologna’ ) when a terrorist bomb exploded in the waiting room of the city’s train station on 2nd August 1980, claiming the lives of 85 people and injuring a further 200. As someone who has lived in Emilia Romagna for the past 11 years, I can vouch for the fact that the topic he has chosen to present in a work of fiction is still a highly sensitive one, akin perhaps to how the Irish would regard a novel set in Omagh in 1998 or the English if the backdrop were the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974.
The perpetrators of this atrocity have never been found but the BBC’s archives section reports that it is widely believed that the attack was carried out by right-wing extremists, probably with the motive of turning public opinion against the ‘Red Brigade’ (Brigate Rosse) . This theory is not one Dorward presents to the reader since it is the communists who are behind the attrocity using a seedy bar, the Usignol(the translation of which gives the novel its title) to plot their campaign.
Dorward says the idea for the novel came from a friend of a friend who was in Bologna at the time of the explosion, and significantly, when asked what he wanted to achieve with the novel, he does not comment on the political angle but instead says: “I wanted to explore ideas of responsibility: what happens when you have to face, in adulthood, the consequences of the actions of the youth that you have turned your back on, and the need, in adulthood, to stay loyal to the naïve, idealistic, selfish, plain stupid, youth, who made you what you are“.
