The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn

Quinn splits his narrative between the rise of that Victorian city and its wartime fall, taking as the hero of his earlier narrative strand a rising young architect, Peter Eames, and of the later, an architectural historian, Tom Baines, who has been commissioned, just before the outbreak of war to produce a study of Liverpool's architectural past. His book's research results in two encounters.

The first is personal — a meeting with Richard Tanqueray, a First World War-veteran who now runs a professional photography studio with his wife, Bella, and who agrees to collaborate with Baines on his book. The second is literary: Baines's old professor, a scholar of Victorian Gothic architecture, directs him towards the uncatalogued journals of Eames, whose architectural career briefly and controversially flourished in 1860s Liverpool before foundering in financial ruin and apparent suicide aged 33..

Eames's journals of his personal and professional life (helpfully printed in a mock-Victorian typeface) alternate with Baines's experiences as war breaks out and he struggles to combine his record of the 19th-century city with his role as part of a heavyrescue team, plucking bodies alive and dead from the rubble of the buildings he is attempting to catalogue. As the novel concludes the two stories converge in betrayal, tragedy and an eerie discovery.

Quinn was born in Liverpool and his intimate knowledge and love of the city rises like heat from the pages of his book. He has a remarkable talent for making the vanished lineaments of the past metropolis vivid and urgent even to a reader who has never set eyes on the Mersey. You might think that the imaginative reconstruction of longdemolished Victorian buildings would be the difficult part of writing a novel that combines an obsession with bricks and mortar with extremities of human passion.

But in The Rescue Man, it is the buildings that seethe with urgent energy, while the human passions remain muted. Quinn is a film critic, and there is a filmic neatness about his narrative choreography that is the enemy of emotional verisimilitude.

Eames and Baines's twin love affairs with cast-iron stanchions and oriel windows are the real heart of this flawed but fascinating novel..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

"Rescue Man" opens on the eve of the Second World War. With uncertainty in the air as the world seems on the brink of disaster, Liverpool is a city tense in anticipation of the coming conflict. Tom Baines is struggling to finish a book chronicling the architecture of his beloved Liverpool. Orphaned as a child and now approaching forty with no prospect of a family of his own, Baines is a man emotionally adrift. Unable to commit to anything, either personal or professional, he is left looking in at life from the outside. Then old university tutor passes on information about the diary of a Victorian architect and sends Baines to a photographer who will help him with his book. Both introductions will change Baines' life. The diary is that of Peter Eames, Victorian visionary and self-proclaimed genius.The photographers are Richard and Bella Tanqueray - a couple with whom Baines forms an immediate bond. The outbreak of war brings a new sense of purpose and unexpected relationships. Baines joins the Rescue Men - retrieving the wounded from bombed buildings. The Blitz is a relentless bombardment trailing devastation and loss in its wake. Yet in wartime ordinary rules are suspended, risks taken and Baines finds himself caught up in a love affair that is as heady and all-consuming as it is transgressive. With writing that is both immediate and deeply steeped in its time, Anthony Quinn recreates wartime Liverpool with the same emotional intensity and fidelity with which he renders the city of Eames' "Victorian" diaries. Quinn is a writer whose facility for language will carry you through the streets of 'the Venice of the North' in a powerful, unforgettable story of love found and lost.