Nineteen Eighty Three

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Heart of darkness - Rated
FOr anyone with even a passing interest in crime fiction, David Peace's Red Riding quartet is essential reading. Set in Yorkshire throughout the seventies and eighties, Peace balances the case of the Yorkshire Ripper with the theme of police corruption. Not cheerful stuff then, but fantastically crafted and well observed.

All four books are violent and disturbing outings. Peace's characters are cruel, selfish and self-loathing creations that stay with the reader long after the book is finished.

1983 is the final part of the quartet and should only be read after completing the first three. This isn't the type of series you can miss bits out of.

As usual the plot is tense and draws the reader in. The kind of book that takes one long sitting, it is very hard to put down. Indeed, due to the breakneck pace of Peace's startling prose, it is often impossible to withdraw from the narrative at all.

This novel is the strongest of the four, utillising a tight yet intricate structure, thrusting the reader back and forth across the decades revealing startling truths about the characters, many of whom are familiar from earlier in the series.

Indeed, many of the images used here are also familiar from earlier giving the reader a sense of a claustrophobic communal nightmare.

If you've never read any David Peace, I suggest starting with the superb 1974 and working your way through. If you've already read the first three books, you need to read this. But then you know that already.

A stunning conclusion to the Quartet - Rated
When a figure dominates a genre as James Ellroy does modern crime fiction, then it is inevitable that blurb writers suggest unnatural comparisons between authors and the master. Many have suffered. Ian Rankin is Scotland's Ellroy; and David Peace is Yorkshire's. While some writers suffer from the comparison, Peace does not.

His series of novels set in and around Leeds at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders is in my view the finest modern British series in crime fiction. Dark, desperate, highly stylised, moving, they engage with modern Britain - drawing on a number of topical themes: abuse; corruption; conspiracy.

This the final novel in the quartet revisits many of the threads initiated in 1974, but are presented in such a way that knowledge of the previous novels is not necessary.

The three principals here: BJ, a rent boy, Piggot, a corrupt solicitor, and Jobson, a corrupt policeman, are set in three different interlinking narratives. In demonstrating how his style has developed since his earlier work, here various devices are used effortlessly. Piggot's chapters are written in the second person, BJ refers to himself continually in the third person. The device differentiates the narrative threads, but also serves to demonstrate the distancing each character has from their story.

The characters are all too human, complex people with complex motivations. Violence is presented explictly, the consequences of actions explored (throughout the whole of the twenty five year span covered by the novel).

The subject matter - violent child murders and abuse - may be too much for some. The writing style may be too much for others. BUt make no mistake, David Peace is the most exciting and most important thing that has happened to crime fiction in the UK in a very long time.

A fitting conclusion to a stunning series - Rated
The "Red Riding" quartet shudders to a shocking climax in this raw,disturbing novel. Peace's style becomes more staccato with every volume;paragraphs become sentences; sentences become words; words become curses,and the physical and mental degradation and damage his protagonists gothrough becomes ever more disturbing. In David Peace's books, there'svery little difference between cops and victims, lawyers and criminals -everyone lives in a world of fear, pain, terror. Anyone can die at anymoment - or worse, they can remain alive to deal with the physical andmental scars.Nineteen Eighty-Three is again dominated by the corrupt, horrificpsychological landscape of West Yorkshire, the hearts of its people asbleak and empty as the moors above the hellish towns. This time we'vealso got the backdrop of an ever-more evil government, an ever-morecorrupt system - in the clash between bent cop Jobson and bent lawyerPigott that forms the backbone of this story and closes the series it'shard to tell which man is more damaged, more amoral. Peace's universe iscomplex and frightening.Is Leeds the hero or villain of this series? Who knows. Peace's Leeds isevery bit as grimly delineated as Chandler's or Ellroy's LA, Rankin'sEdinburgh, or Hiaasen's Florida.Not an easy read, but a compelling and thrilling one.