John wants a column, and since I’m not ready to write the column I was planning just yet, I think I’ll just talk about what I read today.
For the record: On Sunday, February 14, 2010, I finished David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Seven; read David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp; ploughed through 120 pages of Ken Bruen and Jason Starr’s The Max; and read Suicide Squad #38 and #39.
First up, Nineteen Seventy-Seven. It’s the second book in Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, a series of novels set in Yorkshire dealing with, among other things, police corruption and the Yorkshire Ripper murders that plagued the county from about 1975 to 1980, I believe. It’s really a remarkable work. The first novel, Nineteen Seventy-Four, is a really solid piece of crime fiction that follows a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post as he delves into the seemingly related murders of three young girls. It doesn’t end on the most upbeat note.
Nineteen Seventy-Seven, on the other hand, takes everything its predecessor did and cranks it up to eleven. Peace is weaving an incredibly elaborate tapestry of conspiracies and cover-ups, to the point that the reader is really left unsure of who did what to whom and why. While Seventy-Four had a strange type of parlor scene at its climax, with young Eddie Dunford confronting those he thinks responsible with a shotgun, we never really find out just why some of the guilty parties do what did what they did, nor are we even certain of just how guilty they truly are.
Seventy-Seven completely eschews anything even remotely resembling a parlor scene. The closest one gets to it, I suppose, is the novel’s final chapter, in which one of the novel’s two protagonists becomes the subject of an exorcism. And apparently exorcism’s involved a minister hammering a screwdriver into the base of your skull. Was this ever a real thing? I don’t even want to know.
What follow is a more than three page long, italicized paragraph consisting of one very-fucking-rambly sentence, in which Peace employs echoes of phrases he’s previously repeated throughout the rest of the text--“blood on my hands, blood on her face, blood on my lips, blood in her mouth, blood in my eyes, blood in her hair, blood in my tears, blood in hers…he’s coming, ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of posies, he’s coming, fuck you--then you sleep/kiss you--then you wake, and he’s here and there is no hell but this one, Lucky Cow, up to five now they say four but remember Preston ’75, come my load up that one, Dirty Cow”--and on and on.
While there’s a level of coherence to Jack Whitehead’s exorcism-induced revelations, a lot of it doesn’t make sense. The Yorkshire Ripper remains unknown, uncaught. Hell, it’s strongly suggested that Whitehead and the novel’s other protagonist, Bob Fraser, know that at least two of the of the murders attributed to the Ripper were not committed by him, but rather someone else--a policeman, most likely. Though which policeman, we’re never sure; and why he would want these women dead, we’re not really sure either, other than it might have something to do with a porno magazine and some corruption in the vice squad; maybe. Oh yeah, and the murders in Seventy-Seven have at least one, strange, random link to the murders of Seventy-Four that hints at a much larger conspiracy; potentially. Or, y’know, it could all be coincidence.
I also quoted those two fragments above to give you some idea of Peace’s style, which is somewhat wholly represented in those final three pages. At first, his prose looks and sounds like a somewhat calmer version of James Ellroy’s style in American Tabloid or Cold Six Thousand--“word jazz” prose, as I’ve heard some call it. Calmer not, I suppose, in terms of its subject matter, but rather in the rhythm of the sentences. With Ellroy, you feel as if you’re being bludgeoned to death. With Peace, his prose constantly serves to upend what you think you know about the world he’s creating. He shifts back and forth between different syntacitical structures, peppering sentence fragments amongst dialogues, fragments meant to represent brief flashes of memories the reader is never given whole access to.
While there appears to be a strong narrative structure to his novels, with Character A setting out to find a murderer or murderers, things become much more confused once you get down to the level of individual paragraphs within the text.
Here, Fraser--a detective in the Yorkshire police--is sitting in on the interrogation of a suspect in the Yorkshire Ripper murders, and interrogation conducted by himself and his partners, Rudkin and Ellis.
He’s on his knees, on the floor, in the corner, hands up, nose bloody.
My body weak.
‘Come on,’ shouts Rudkin. ‘Where the fuck were you?’
I was battering down doors, battering down people, kicking in doors, kicking in people.
‘Working,’ he screams.
Ellis, fists into the wall, ‘Liar!’
I was raping whores, fucking them up the arse.
‘I was.’
‘You murdering bastard. You tell me now!’
I was breaking into houses, stealing cars, beating up cunts like Eric Hall.
‘I was working.’
‘The Fucking truth!’
I was searching for a whore.
‘Working, I was fucking working.’
Rudkin picks him up off the floor, rights the chair and sits him in it, nodding at the door.
‘You fucking sit here and you think about where the fuck you were at two o’clock this morning and what you were bloody doing?’
I was on the floor of the Redbeck, in tears.
All the italicized statements are Fraser’s own admissions. The “whore” he was searching for was his lover, Janice, a prostitute he first met when he arrested her. The most obvious effect of this style is that Fraser, a policeman, falls into the place of the criminal, with his italicized statements serving as a response to the questions his partners are posing, albeit to a different party. Peace breaks down the distinction between detective and murderer to the point that, later on, the reader has to seriously consider the idea that their seemingly reliable narrator, Bob Fraser, has indeed murdered his prostitute girlfriend without telling us about it.
(for the record, I’m pretty sure he didn’t, but there’s still a little bit of ambiguity in the text that keeps me from delivering too definitive a sentence on his character.)
Peace’s world becomes so bleak because of this, that it really doesn’t matter who’s been murdering prostitutes and young girls in Yorkshire. Might be the police, might be a lone psychopath, might be both working independent of one another but still grouped together by someone desperately trying to impose some pattern, some way of making meaning out of these senseless deaths.
The novel closes on perhaps one of the bleakest notes I’ve ever read in a story:
“...and I stand at the door and knock, the keys to death and hell and the mystery of the woman, knowing this is why people die, this is why people, in 1977 this is why I see--
He brought the hammer down.
--No future.”
(I mean, christ, what do I do with that? The book ends with its main character having a fucking screwdriver hammered into his head! And reading those final pages to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s “‘Piphany Rambler” was a really disturbing experience. I love when your world’s soundtrack matches up with what you’re reading in these weird little moments of kismet.)
Whitehead’s got the keys to the mystery there at the end, but he’s unable to open the door. In fact, it’s because he has those keys that he sees “no future.” Solving the central mysteries of the novel’s plot wouldn’t change a thing. The women are still dead for the same reasons they were killed in the first place, regardless of whether or not we the reader know what those reasons were. The novel’s ending would have been just as depressing either way, yet it would have given us some false sense of justice where there really was none to be found.
Anyway. I was hoping to just spend half the time on Nineteen Seventy-Seven and the other half on Asterios Polyp, but that’s already more than 1,300 words. Maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow, but if not, I doubt the internet will be shedding too many tears for lack of my cutting and faux-tentious analysis of a book that most critics have placed as one of the best of the previous decade.
Now I’m going to go pop some pills and hit the bed, and I suggest you do the same.
But first, a musical interlude from Silver Mt. Zion: Listen to “God Bless Our Dead Marines.”
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