Arms and the Women by
Reginald Hill
hbk out February 00
Published by HarperCollins
at £16.99
Arms and the Women is the eighteenth title in the long-running Dalziel-and-Pascoe series. It has the difficult job of following On Beulah Height, a dark and complex book which was one of the best crime novels of the 1990s. Hill deals with the problem by refusing to compete with himself. Instead he has written something which is unlike anything he has done before.
One level the novel is about heroism in both its masculine and feminine varieties. Once again, Hill returns to Mid Yorkshire, where someone is gunning for Ellie, Chief Inspector Pascoe’s tough-minded wife. Her husband and Superintendent Dalziel assume with typical male arrogance that it has something to do with them.
The truth is altogether more varied and far less simple. Hill showers the storyline with is almost an embarrassment of genre devices – Irish terrorism, arms smuggling, a cocaine shipment, Colombian revolutionaries, human rights activists and a pair of doomed Oxbridge mandarins pursuing deviously conflicting ambitions in the security service. But pride of place in this novel is reserved for the extensive cast of women.
As the title suggests, there are classical echoes to Arms and the Women – not just Virgilian but Homeric as well. Ellie Pascoe has literary ambitions. Partly as a form of therapy, she draws together elements from the Aeneid and the Odyssey and combines them into a parodic fable of masculine heroism. Pious Aeneas and his party, fleeing from the sack of Troy, land on an inhospitable island. So too does a shipwrecked Greek, wily Odysseus, who can expect no mercy from the Trojans. Then there’s the twist: the island belongs to Calypso, a capricious nymph with what turns out to be a boundless sexual appetite; so Odysseus has something to trade.
Chapters from Ellie’s story form a novel within the novel, counterpointing and commenting on events in Mid-Yorkshire. Any resemblance between pious Peter Pascoe and wily Andy Dalziel are entirely intentional.
Many long-running crime series run into difficulties because their authors are incapable of writing more than a handful of novels; and so the later titles degenerate into variations on already established themes. But Hill refuses to repeat himself, which is one reason why he’s probably the best living male crime writer in the English-speaking world. Arms and the Women is a witty and intelligent novel which demands much from its readers and gives them much in return. Hill never forgets that a crime writer’s bounden duty is to surprise and entertain the punters. The book has much to say, and not just about the nature of heroism. Hill’s characters steadily develop. Dalziel and Pascoe are not the only ones to take centre stage – this novel has more to do with Ellie than with them.
Hill is an author who constantly takes risks, both with the fictional elements he draws into the books and with the literary techniques he uses. Like Dickens, he brings a powerful though never uncritical compassion to bear on his subjects and the society that has spawned them. And like Dickens, he makes us laugh as well.
Not bad for a crime writer.
Review first published in the Independent on 5 February 2000
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
Arms and the Women by
Reginald Hill