Tangled Web UK Review February 2008
Dead Point: A Jack Irish Thriller by
Peter Temple
hbk out March 08
Published by Quercus
at £12.99
Peter Temple’s new Jack Irish book starts with a horse-racing tragedy, and concludes (a horse called Pelecanos failing to live up to his early promise!) with a racing triumph; evidence of course that Temple set out to make his protagonist ‘a complete person’, providing him with a ready wit, an ex-wife or two (one murdered), a daughter, an occasional erotic companion and a wide circle of friends. Most prominent are Harry Strang and Cam Delray, Jack’s buddies in the occasional horse-racing scams (known locally as ‘plunges’), nothing illegal you understand, but in which local bookies quite often sustain large losses.
Another mainly male enclave is the Prince of Prussia, a local hostelry now providing sustenance, both liquid and intellectual not only to the hip, sexually experimental IT crowd that has recently moved into the neighbourhood, but also to the Fitzroy Youth Club, disillusioned supporters of the defunct local football team, dry-witted and wordly wise ("of depravity they could know a good deal: more than 230 years of experience sat in this brown corner." Don’t you just love that ‘could’?). For solitude and calm reflection Jack repairs to the carpentry workshop of Charlie Taub, where, if Charlie is absent, he communes with a sixty year old block plane ("long translucent shavings whispered through the plane’s throat, bending back with the grace of a ballerina’s arm").
My God, it’s hard to tear yourself away. But needs must as these interludes serve not only to illustrate the life of a ‘suburban solicitor, with all the breadth of cultural and other interests that the term conveys’ but also to indicate the fragility of life, its constant teetering on the edge of disaster. It soon transpires (ie within the first 21 pagesTemple is no slouch with the plotting) that one recent plunge has been rumbled and a key but non-executive participant, a woman, robbed and savagely beaten. Similarly the missing barman Robbie Colburne, the subject of Jack’s current commission from the ‘dubious’ Cyril Wootton (‘how thin and swaying was the rope he walked’) has just been found dead, in his car.
What follows is perhaps the best plotted of the three Irish books to date (back home in Australia, this was Temple’s third Ned Kelly Award winner). Corruption is once again at the centre of the plot, but this time the action concerns the bit-players who make it possible; the three key strands of the plot interlocking almost invisibly, increasing pace, unexpected revelations, the language tauter by the paragraph. And here, in the closing stages of the book, Temple still brings life to every scene: “Far, far away a dog barking, a long strangled sound. The full moon, it stirred dogs in their blood, all their fluids, people too. It was cold, a wind coming off the lake, off Bass Strait beyond the lake... I shut my mind and set off down the track into the dark, walking quickly.”
That's the trouble with any book by Peter Temple. You just want to keep on quoting chunks of its glorious prose and dialogue. Save me the trouble. Buy this book (and the other two like it*).
* Bad Debts and Black Tide, by no coincidence, both available in paperback
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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