Anticipation: 1983

Capital New York’s weekly anticipations list. I anticipate the weekly anticipations list (written by editors and writers for Capital), and now I’m on it. I didn’t have to think twice about what my entry would be.

I started Nineteen Eighty-Three yesterday. It’s been a year of crime novels so far. This is the fourth book in the Red Riding quartet (which was made into 3 separate movies, The Red Riding Trilogy – must-see if you haven’t already, I mentioned them all here), and I will be so sorry to see this experience end. The fourth book is told from the point of view of three separate narrators, two whom we already know peripherally from the other books – Maurice Jobson, the corrupt Yorkshire cop, and BJ, the tormented street kid who knows too much. Add to the mix in this fourth volume, John Piggott, a “solicitor” who is called in to manage the appeal of Michael Myshkin, the halfwit originally arrested for the Yorkshire murders although it’s generally believed that he was railroaded into a confession. Piggott (who has a sad circle of a life, he’s fat and unhappy and lonely) is played in the movie by the wonderful Mark Addy (my favorite in The Full Monty), and here, in the fourth book, he enters the narrative. Maurice Jobson’s voice is almost without emotion (almost), and much of his sections read like a script, with no “he saids” or “she saids”, all dialogue, no introspection. BJ’s narrative takes place on a crucial date in the past, the date which holds all the disparate clues that no one can put together. And Piggott’s voice uses what I always think of as the Bright Lights Big City narrator (way overdone now by this point, but it was a bit startling to read back then), but which is really called the second-person narrator. These are all devices, of course, but the quartet is a series full of devices. David Peace is a dazzling writer, and I mean that literally. He means to impress, to dazzle, to blind you. There’s a showoff at work here. I don’t mind that so much when the story is compelling, or the writing is good. If you’re good? Show off all you like. Finnegans Wake, looked at in this light, is nothing more than a talented little kid showing off at the piano. I suppose there would be some who would Shush said child, and tell him to hide his little light under a bushel, but I’m not one of those people. Peace’s books read full-throttle, they are violent and relentless. The details of the murders are told in excruciating and yet repetitive detail, providing a numbing effect, the way it must have felt for the cops at the time. “Yeah, yeah, conked on the head with a hammer, yeah, I know …” Bleak books with a bleak outlook on humanity. Compulsively readable.

Excerpt from Nineteen Eighty-Three: The Red Riding Quartet, Book Four:

You drive over one bridge and under another, past the boarded-up pubs and closed-down shops, the burnt-out bus stops and the graffiti that hates everything, everywhere, and everyone but especially the IRA, Man United, and the Pakis —
This is Fitzwilliam:
Back for the second time in a week, in a year.
Least it has stopped raining —
Turning out rite nice for once.
The off-licence is the only thing open so you park the car and go inside and slide the money through a slot to an Asian man and his little lad standing in a cage in their best pyjamas among the bottles of unlabelled alcohol and the single cigarettes. The father slides your change back, the son your twenty Rothman.
Two girls are sat outside on the remains of a bench. They are drinking Gold Label Merrydown cider and Benilyn cough syrup. A dog is barking at a frightened child in a pushchair, an empty bottle of Thunderbird rolling around on the concrete. The girls have dyed short rats’ tails and fat mottled legs in turquoise clothes and suede pointed boots.
The dog turns from the screaming baby to growl at you.
One of the girls says: ‘You fancy a fuck, fatty? Tenner back at hers.’