Sometimes life is stranger than fiction. And lives don't come much stranger than that of Special Forces operative Captain Robert Nairac.

Novelist Eoin McNamee has taken the real-life story of this English soldier, who immersed himself in the shadowy margins of Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and has woven a fictional narrative around it that is both compelling and repulsive.

At 11, Nairac was sent to Ampleforth public school in North Yorkshire. His education there went far beyond the three Rs, taking in falconry, boxing and, most importantly, self-preservation.

His thirst for adventure eventually took him to Ireland, where McNamee portrays him as an arrogant interloper in a world of heretic plotters, outcasts and dead-eyed paramilitarists.

No one is sure who he is working for, including his intelligence agency bosses, and no one completely trusts him. But everyone is drawn to him.

Written at breakneck speed and with breathtaking clarity, The Ultras is not a book for the fainthearted.

Hard men making hard decisions is never going to make for an easy read. But when brutality is so obviously a way of life, it can surely come as no surprise to even the most nave reader that Nairac's own life can only have one conclusion.

Let's just say you will never look at a meat pie in the same way again. An unpalatable end, maybe, but a very tasty read.

Updated: 16:36 Friday, April 08, 2005