"The Bloody City"is a realist novel, that takes the reader through the first year of the Northern Ireland Troubles: it begins in the final months of 1968 as the Northern Ireland civil rights movement takes to the streets and ends after the August 1969 riots. The protagonist is, to a degree, autobiographical. Like Gilbert, "Frank Downton" is a son attempting to work with his father in a family business that, in many respects, is a stolid representation of the city's dissolving Victorian and Unionist order. Downton is caught up in the street violence and in the sectarian, class and sexual tensions of the workplace.