Rob Kenyon, the Reform candidate for Makerfield, has written a book – probably the finest Nazi-battling, time-travelling, affair-having book currently on the market
“An epic journey of one man’s attempt to readjust an alternate future whilst wrestling with his moral compass, lust and ego and all the while practising the art of self-preservation.” You could be forgiven for thinking, especially with the lust and ego bit, this s a perfect description of Rob Kenyon’s battle to win a seat in Parliament, as the Reform candidate in the upcoming Makerfield by-election. It is not.
It is, however, the blurb on his 2017 novel The Blood Waltz – a rollercoaster thriller full of danger, suspense, time-travel, Nazis, action, romance, and (almost) sex scenes, heavily influenced by classic WW2 period pieces like Where Eagles Dare, The English Patient and the BBC ’s definitive chronicle of the 1939 – 1945 conflict, Goodnight Sweetheart.
The book is available on Amazon for 99p or free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited (or you can have my copy) so if you intend to read it – and it is ideal for the beach, any short to medium haul flight, or a particularly sadistic dentist’s waiting room – then you should look away now as spoilers follow.
It’s an interesting plot. We are into the action straight away, following the adventures of Lance Corporal Bradley Clyde, as he hops between timelines fighting evil and seducing ladies. Write what you know, they say, and there is a lot of Mr Kenyon in his protagonist. Like Clyde, Mr Kenyon served in the Royal Engineers, grew up in the north-west and is a keen rugby league fan. I have not met Mr Kenyon, so I don’t know if he is ‘tall, tough, athletic and a good rugby player with a mischievous side’ but Clyde is, so make of that what you will.
Mr Kenyon is excellent on detail. From the conversion rate of Germany currency, to the intricacies of UK military hardware. For example: “Each of the troops carry an L85A2 rifle. Some of the older soldiers still don’t trust the L85A2 or SA80, as it’s also known despite the modifications made to the rifle over the years, it had gained a bad reputation during the late 1980s and early 1990s and was colloquially nicknamed ‘The Politican’ as it hardly worked and you couldn’t fire it.’ (Must remember that one in the event Mr Kenyon sweeps to power.)
But enough about weapons – let’s get to the sex. It’s become clear that the Reform candidate is a red-blooded male, prone to outbursts of lustful, pheromone drenched, outpourings. Mercifully, Mr Kenyon the author is more restrained than Mr Kenyon the candidate. Although there are signs of his pulse stirring when hero Clyde arranges an illicit meeting with the wife of his deadly enemy Jaeger – a Captain in the Gestapo, not the M&S clothing line.
When Anna ‘walks effortlessly’ into the hotel bar, Clyde is immediately struck by the ‘tops of her breasts’ framed by her charcoal fur coat. Then a few sentences later he clocks her cleavage. Couple of seconds later he watches the waiter struggle to ‘keep his eyes from her breasts’, next paragraph ‘bosom,’ then the waiter comes back for another look. After all that, we forget about Anna’s breasts for a few minutes while some plot is explained, then she slips off a high-heel, and slowly moves ‘her foot onto Clyde’s throbbing…’
I had to stop there because my tea was ready, but people have been thrown out of Wetherspoon ’s for less. To be fair to Mr Kenyon, the more graphic moments are never – mercifully – played out on the page but left to the reader’s imaginings. There are clear nods to Casablanca, in their forbidden love and other classic film references such as 1993’s In The Line of Fire, where Clyde channels Clint Eastwood as he watches Anna walk away and tells his pal: ‘If she turns around to look at me, she’ll be spending the night with me.’ (I don’t want to ruin anything here but she does, indeed, turn around and look at him.)
But it’s not just sex and romance, this book, there’s tension of a different sort as well. Mr Kenyon is clearly a Tarantino fan, and there is a phenomenal passage where the author somehow manages to give the iconic Christopher Waltz scene from Inglorious Basterds the treatment it actually deserved by taking the sparse, minimalist dialogue and making it much longer and more complicated.
Clyde and his nemesis Jaeger are sitting down for a chat. Anna, is Jaeger’s wife, and Clyde is beginning to suspect his arch-enemy has cottoned on to his affair. The scene plays out with a nail-bitingly tense exchange over a couple of pages where Jaeger uses a jug of cream and spoon to let Clyde know that he knows and that he knows Clyde knows.
‘Everybody likes cream, however, I’m taking a little at a time, this way, nobody notices.’ Then: ‘If I were to take all the cream then there would be none left for anybody else, people might be reluctant to give me the milk just in case I take all of the cream and then the chef wouldn’t be happy.’
Bit more elaboration on chefs, but keeping the cream theme: ‘Chefs by nature are aggressive and know exactly how much cream there should be. Then he hammers it home with: ‘Now if someone in the camp had a cat…’
There are other fantastic passages in the book, where Clyde and Mr Kenyon’s characters overlap, where Clyde makes it clear life behind a desk is not for him and he ‘wanted to go full throttle in getting involved in the fight as it was what he was used to and what he was good at and truth be told he had missed it.’ It’s talk like that gets you out leafleting on a Saturday morning, let me tell you. Stirring stuff.
It is rare to discover work of this quality on the campaign trail. It’s worth checking whether in Andy Burnham ’s back catalogue he has ever written a line like: ‘I’ll smash this ceramic basin, pick up a piece and cut me loose’ during a dramatic escape scene, or a gratuitous bantery insult towards the Welsh: ‘Where men are men and sheep are scared’ or – when discussing time-travel: ‘I could kill Hitler’ which for some reason I kept reading in Stu Francis’ voice.
Mr Burnham may have a better record on the economy, a better vision for the country, and less explicit social media posts, but he is not in the same league as Mr Kenyon as an artist. I very much enjoyed this book, and would urge as many people as possible to buy it and thus encourage Mr Kenyon to stop messing about with politics or plumbing or social media. Forget Westminster, female rugby players, Carol Vorderman. Pick up the pen full-time.
This one took six years to write, and is probably the finest Nazi-battling, time-travelling, affair-having, double-crossing, breast-enjoying book currently on the market. The world cannot wait that long for a sequel – and after June 18 Mr Kenyon will have plenty of time to get to cracking.
*The Blood Waltz, by Rob Kenyan, is available for £12.99 hardback. £6.99 paperback, 99p on Kindle. It has several five-star reviews on Amazon, with one customer saying it should be a film.