STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS
Ted Chiang
Monday 9 December 2019
Saturday 7 December 2019
Wednesday 4 December 2019
RED RIDING 1974- REVIEW
Tom Wells
This is the city. I mean, the shire. I mean, the administrative county. Every two days, there’s a murder; every two hours, an assault; every two seconds, a secretion, a suppuration, an emission, a discharge. That’s where Edward Dunford comes in. He carries a badge. A press badge.
In his novel 1974, David Peace wants West Riding to be James Ellroy’s Los Angeles only more. Or less. More corrupt, more dangerous, more deadly. Crazier, grittier, edgier. And less hygienic. A lot less hygienic. The result is a mama’s stew of pornography, gore-nography and pore-nography that in the end is so OTT as to make you reassess a book that starts out as a decent enough page-turner.
Not least because Peace writes in a punchy style that evokes LA mystery writers while staying true to its time and place. The story is being told by an actual writer--not a cop with literary ambitions, but the newly minted North of England Crime Correspondent for a regional newspaper. Edward Dunford is fresh off his first Page One story and jonesing for more. But it wouldn’t be proper noir if he didn’t have an amoral rival, didn’t run afoul of every form of authority and wasn’t his own worst enemy.
Blessed with the kind of intuition noir protagonists invariably have, Edward senses that the recent disappearance of a ten-year-old girl is tied to two similar murders in the previous five years. His editor wants proof. So do the cops. Edward sets out to find some.
His desultory investigation gets a kick in the right direction when his colleague Barry, an investigative journalist with his nose in the business affairs of local developers, dies in a traffic accident involving a delivery van, sheet glass and decapitation. Suspicious? Apparently only to Edward, who is bequeathed Barry’s horde of incriminating files.
Along the way to solving multiple mysteries, Edward treats everyone and everything very badly: girlfriends, witnesses, colleagues, his mother, his father’s memory, his father’s watch, office equipment, vehicles, home furnishings. He is unable to have a conversation with a woman without it escalating into a knock-down drag-out fight or fuck. Coupled with his inability to keep bodily fluids—spit, snot, piss, pus, cum, blood, sweat, tears--from entering the eco-system and possessed of a two-word potty mouth, he is not exactly the poster boy for Northern hospitality.
The local police therefore take every opportunity to knock some manners into the pesky busybody and, in the end, literally beat the shit out of him. Yet, despite being on the wrong end of the mother of all brutality, Edward still manages to dust himself off and go on a rampage for justice that makes Buford Pusser look like the Dalai Lama.
Who would no doubt advise Edward, “Be kind whenever possible; it is always possible.” To which Edward would no doubt reply, “The Dalai fucking Lama.”
**½
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