Nineteen Eighty Three by
David Peace
pbk out March 04
(Serpent's Tail)
at £7.99
This is the final book in Peace's West Riding quartet, books which chart the bleak
years of the Yorkshire Ripper and blend fact and fiction in a relentless and bloody
expose. Peace, now resident in Japan, grew up in West Yorkshire in those dark times;
haunted by the murders, fearful that he may know the killer or that his mother might
be the next victim and obsessed with the hunt for the Ripper. Peace is most often
compared to James Ellroy: both writers take noir to the extreme in depicting worlds
sick with corruption and devoid of the hope of salvation and both use a staccato poetic
style to hammer home the story. Here crime and violence are filthy, painful events
which disgust us and there are no heroes to ride to anyone's rescue and make it all
better. In this final instalment Peace uses three narrators: lawyer Big John Piggott,
rent boy BJ and corrupt cop Maurice Jobson, giving them each a distinct style. He
thrusts us into a violent world where the harrowing serial murders of both women and
children unfold in the moral abyss created by police brutality and criminality. The
present feeds upon the past and the plot culminates in further carnage. It is easy to get
lost in the maze of stories, there are many characters and the narratives cut back and
forth in time. Perhaps better to read the quartet as a whole, but this ambitious work is
unforgettable and bears witness to a terrible era.
Manchester Evening News 13.3.04
(
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries set on the mean streets of Manchester)
Nineteen Eighty Three by
David Peace
