David Peace (1) (1967–)

Deeply unpleasant but ultimately satisfying read. I can’t imagine that folks would go straight to Nineteen Seventy-Seven without reading Nineteen Seventy-Four first, so prospective readers would already be familiar with Peace prose:

The clipped, staccato rhythms.

Hypnotic in their repetition.

In their repetition.

The refusal to connect the narrative dots for the reader.

Words spat out like bullets from a machine gun etc.

Unpleasant: the torrents of profanity, the racism and misogyny, not to show more mention explicit violence, are relentless and punishing and not for the squeamish.

But satisfying: it's nonetheless a hell of a page-turning read. Peace packs tension in between the lines, even in the most ordinary sequences (like in the many scenes of copious drinking). The reader's patience for the damaged and obsessive protagonists is arguably tested by their tendency towards melodramatic torment -- there's an awful lot of drunken tears and suicidal self-pity, even more than characters in a James Ellroy novel -- but the book on the whole is well worth the effort. Just don't be surprised if you want to start viewing cute puppy videos on YouTube after reading the book just to shake the bleakness and grime off. show less

What a disgusting, contemptible, morally repulsive book.

The main character is a garbage human being. He moons over pictures of perfect little school girls a bit too much. His opinions of grown women are disgusting and weak. He ditches his girlfriend when he impregnates her. She's forced to have an abortion without support from him. It's barely believable that he has any sort of relationship with any woman. He uses the word “fuck” until it becomes little more than an irritant rather than show more a word of emphasis. I found myself wishing for his demise, so he could just die already and be over with the thing.

Ed is an unreliable narrator in a profession that relies on reliability. Told from his POV, the narrative can go from snooze-worthy tedium to WTF! in less than a paragraph. This is a person who needs psychiatric meds. Now.

The horror of the book is that all the characters are drowning in shit and piss. They revel in the basest of needs and wants. They are corrupt and self-serving to the point of absurdity. And their helpless victims are butchered because of it.

Let's not say that it is a product of an era. Not on the day after the LISK was finally arrested. Because women and girls are still dying while law enforcement diddles with egos out, treat women with contempt, and upper-class people pearl-clutch about names without actually doing anything for women in danger. Nothing ever changes. Not really.

I did not love the experience of this book, but that doesn't mean that the book is bad.

However, it's an unpleasant book that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. show less

This is the second book in Peace's Red Riding Hood Quartet. It is just as grim and well-written as the first one. Although there are two narrators here, Jack Whitehead and Bobby Fraser, their voices are very similar (and like Nineteen Seventy-Four's Eddie Dunford), that I sometimes had trouble telling them apart. That was my only real problem with Peace's writing, however, as this book only seems to improve on the gory poetry of the first. The violence, corruption, and horror is almost mind show more numbing, and Peace's unique stream-of-consciousness ramblings, where the comma splices come like bullets and the obscenity pools like piles of blood, contributes to a sense of unreality, despite the realistic details of the setting. It's a nightmare that you can't wake up from, because if you put the book down, you will still be thinking about it, wondering what is truth and what is a dream. A brutal, beautifully styled noir, where there are no real answers (although I'm hoping we may get some by the end of the quartet), no heroes, and no rest for the wicked (the good don't exist). I will definitely be reading the rest of the series. It's like watching a train wreck, where you can't look away, and some perverted part of you doesn't want to. Four and a half stars. show less

Quite the perfect Christmas read, Peace’s filthy goddamn Yorkshire horror story is fucking fantastic. It’s a real accomplishment when you can return from the adapted material, Channel 4’s excellent three-part series of TV films, to the source material and get a serious kick out of it without going ‘Oh I know where this is all going, so what’s the bloody point?’

Peace’s prose is crystal clear, grimy, yet absolutely ideal for the yarn he spins here - a journalistic style primed to show more adequately elucidate the plight of his protagonist. You crack open a page of Nineteen Seventeen Four and bile practically seeps out of the page, coagulated blood makes the book so sickly and sticky you can barely pry the thing open. It’s pitch perfect nausea, absolutely unrelenting. I mean this thing is pegged as Yorkshire noir, but calling it noir isn’t a sufficient enough term for the blackness found here.

Nineteen Seventeen Four swings like a pendulum between God and his angels and the abject horror of a dead young girl’s leering smile as it emerges from black and white school photos, and the momentum of this thematic swing, this contradiction between the graceful and omnibenevolent movement of a swan to the utterly pitch black corruption of all and sundry creates a giddy sickness and delirium within the (un)fortunate reader. Dreams bubble forth into the narrative, collapsing frameworks of reference, an endless vista of grey nothingness illuminating the entire tragedy.

Mark Fisher’s characterisation of the novels (I’m only at the first so fingers crossed Peace’s own writerly momentum carries through, both thematically and when it comes to being bloody interesting) as Manichaean/Gnostic is spot on. His chapter dedicated to it in Ghosts of my Life is certainly worth a flick through for those interested.

But yeah, fan-fucking-tastic. I devoured this sucker (like our good ol’ character BJ) and will quickly get through the rest. As I bothered doing a review I’ll give the same old music recs to play alongside, even though the book has a sickly discography of its own consisting of Elton John and Bryan Ferry and all that lot if you’re a die hard when it comes to getting the actual diegetic atmosphere.

- Penderecki, Sacred Choral Works
- Branca, World Turned Upside Down
- Branca, Symphony No.5
- Porter Ricks, Porter Ricks
- Akira Rabelais, Spellewauerynsherde show less