GBH

Are there villains more squalid and vile than the narrator of GBH? Answer is there none. No, wait. The answer is none there. Dammit. None. None more squalid nor vile. A pornographer and snuff merchant who tortures and murders his way through his own gangland mob when threatened by rivals, a wife and sidekick nearly as bad as him, cops in his pocket and enemies under his heel. But something is going on and it's hard to put his exposed electric wires on it. We know it all goes wrong, though, because the story is split into the past, The Smoke, with Fowler at the height of his power, and the present, The Sea, with Fowler hiding out at a deserted out-of-season beach resort.

The disintegration of his empire and the disintegration of his mind show more are told with wonderful, calm and literate prose, reflecting the urbane civility of the man with monsters underneath. Utterly brilliant, searing and harrowing as he is brought low first by his ego, and then by the tiny sliver of a conscience he doesn't even know he has. show less

This is an important British noir. A psychotic sociopathic gangster George Fowler gets outplayed by the system and by his own paranoia and mental fragility. It has one flaw, however, that is appropriate for its thriller market but detracts from its status as a classic - exaggeration.

One exaggeration is that Fowler himself is an amalgam of Paul Raymond (who was not violent) and the Krays (who were not capable of sustained legitimate business management) with a partner in crime who is half Fiona Richmond and half something out of a more lurid Italian giallo.

The other exaggeration is the extent of corruption in the system. The coppers of the 1970s dealing with gangland businesses were as dodgy as hell but not quite to the level of show more organisational corruption suggested here. It makes a good story but obliges too great a suspension of disbelief.

We have been here before with Scerbanenco's 'Private Venus' (see our review of December 6th, 2020) and Richard Stark's 'The Hunter' (see our review of December 16th, 2020), both of which mythologise organised crime in a way that does not survive the test of time.

Lewis had varied fortunes with his books and died relatively young as an alcoholic. He also left London to return to his local small town after a failed marriage and an inability to build on his success as author of the novel behind the cult film, 'Get Carter'.

Once you know this and you have read the book, you know that 'GBH' is about the author as much as George Fowler, a fantasy spun around a reality of personal experience in which Fowler's mental state and the collapse of his world looks as if it echoes that of Lewis, at least in part.

And this is why the book is, despite the flaws, well worth reading. Lewis takes no prisoners in portraying a world centred not merely on pornography but on pornography that involves psychopathic torture and murder ('snuff movies') but he is also interested in suffering and loss.

In fact, while 'snuff movies' may exist (it is hard to prove that they do not although nearly all cases prove to be special effects), the scale of the industry and its normality within organised crime is yet another exaggeration for dramatic effect. Lewis keeps tipping us just over the edge of plausibility.

As a gangster story, 'GBH' thus does not stand up as well as its literary supporters seem to want it to do but as a psychological study of that grey area between an author and his creation, it begins to take on a new light and rise rapidly in status again.

What Lewis does well is plot his tale and construct characters and relationships that - if you accept the core problems as artistic licence - work well as a story line that pulls you in. Lewis is brilliant at evoking location and atmosphere whether a 1970s penthouse or a run-down seaside variety theatre.

Fowler himself does not entirely persuade because he seems simultaneously too hysterical and yet too articulate and 'middle class' in tone to represent the Kray side of the story while the 'Richardsons' of the story (the Stephensons) are shallowly presented as exceptionally stupid.

But the corrupt policeman Collins and the vicious and perverted cold killer Mickey 'come alive' as do characters such as Eddie, the third rate local promoter, and the various bar men who scatter the tale. The strange psychosis cleverly leaves a doubt whether we are dealing with a revenant.

Lewis adopts an unusual narrative style which has very short chapters alternating as 'Smoke' and Sea' telling two tales concurrently that are actually successive in time. 'Smoke' evokes the organised crime world of 1970s London and 'Sea' the dereliction of an out-of season seaside resort.

This is very skilled writing, managing to maintain pace along two tracks without allowing the second story to give the game away in the first - everything has to be wrapped up at the end in a different authorial voice and we do not mind. The final chapter leaves a mystery intact.

There really are unexpected twists and you may need a strong stomach for two or three short scenes of violence - both intended and accidental. The book is both filmic and unfilmable (at least not without taking out of the story some of its central mystery).

One senses a writer who knew real sociopaths, was fascinated and horrified by them at the same time but was certainly not one himself. Lewis does not really get to the core of a sociopath's mind here, however. Fowler sits as a sociopath by conduct but not entirely by thought patterns.

The grief and suffering of Fowler in the second story line come from the experience of a different type of human being to the one who created a criminal empire based on the most extreme forms of vice.

This is less of a problem if we stop trying to understand the mind of a violent pornographer in the snuff trade and a participant in violent orgies and see him rather just as a troubled human being whose paranoiac intelligence is just not up to understanding the logic of a real plot against him.

Perhaps my sense that Lewis was exorcising all sorts of demons when he wrote this novel is an over-simplistic reaction (after all, who can know another mind) but it is rare to find what was clearly intended to be a popular thriller rising to this higher level of flawed psychological subtlety. show less

This is a book about Fear. I am not sure it is a nice read, but it is compelling and you do not forget it in a hurry.

I became very impatient with the story and just wanted to know what happened. Wrap it up. Was not worth the trip.

2/7/2016 7:53 AM Well reviewed in Washington Post - Crime Fiction