I¹m not sure this e-mail got through in the deluge/avalanche of stuff on
hardboiled theories, R. Mc Donald and Vietnam, so I¹m re-sending it in case
some of you have any ideas about the authors mentioned...Thanks in
advance...
Montois trying to come out of the snow pile...
Simply wondering if some of you in UK have already read the new David Peace
book reviewed today in Times UK...As mentioned once here, I discovered him
because of somebody at Rara and I¹m mesmerized and I have since discovered
that he¹s very highly though of in France...From the review here it sounds
very noir indeed...since many of us seem to be wondering what that moniker
means nowadays...and it also seems to be leaning towards some of Auster¹s
tropes...
Also...in one article in a magazine listing ³The 50 Crime Stories Writers
that count today...² there is mention of names that I have either missed or
not seen in our discussions: Jo Nesbro (Norway), Chuck Palahniuk (US), Deon
Meyer (SA)...
Can any of you give larger info about these authors...impressions,
facts...etc....
Many merci¹s in advance...
Montois de Détroit
From The Times
August 1, 2009
Occupied City by David Peace
The Times review by Tim Teeman: Repetitive, insistent, poetic, this muscular
narrative wraps the reader in a gritty postwar Tokyo
Last night the comedian Kevin Bishop scored a direct hit on his new Channel
4 show with a pastiche of a trailer of a forthcoming drama. The drama was
grimy, the story made little sense, it was set in the North, it rained,
characters fell to the ground wailing ³Gritty Bafta².
One inspiration, surely, was Red Riding, the acclaimed Channel 4 drama
adapted from three (out of four) David Peace novels, about dark deeds in and
around West Yorkshire police in the 1970s and 1980s. What a head-scratching
weirdo it was, evoking more than it revealed, yet spellbinding for all that:
³gritty Bafta² material to the max (even if it wasn¹t actually nominated).
Those seeking to be further mystified, but transfixed, by Peace¹s muscular
narrative powers will not be disappointed by Occupied City, the second of
his Tokyo trilogy about the US occupation of Japan. At the heart of this
novel is the true story of the fatal poisoning of a group of employees at
the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo in 1948 and the search for the killer, who also
robbed the bank. There are broader themes, too: the all-pervading sense of
disintegration of postwar Tokyo, and the abuse and development of biological
weapons.
The story is told in many voices; and those voices, whether characters or
newspaper reports, are insistent, and, like many a Peace-ian narrator,
repetitive. Lines are written as poetry. Tokyo is an ³Occupied City², but it
is also a ³Perplexed City², ³Posthumous City ... this city that is no city,
into the grey place, this place that is no place²: in Peace¹s work artifice,
reportage and fiction collide. The plot is not linear. The repetition, the
rhythm, the flow and tone of the novel, are more like an incantation.
RELATED LINKS
Occupied City by David Peace
This may prove puzzling, even frustrating, but the raw beauty of Peace¹s
language, the clotted trajectory of the story, envelops you. When he writes
of one of the bank tellers who survives ‹ and who is later pursued by a
journalist, first professionally, then personally ‹ you feel every desperate
movement of her crawl to freedom from where her colleagues were brutally
murdered. Peace writes brilliantly of shattered roads, shattered lives,
poison entering one¹s body, a fragmenting self, fragmenting society. Every
scar and scarred surface, every broken body and broken mind is brutally
realised.
One of the most effective chapters is a series of alternating letters from
an American officer investigating Japan¹s biological weapons development, to
his wife and to his commanders. The letters begin in 1945, with the war just
ended: he is looking forward to coming home. But his mission becomes
complicated and compromised; his letters home become less sunny and more
wry, then less wry and simply desperate. By the end of the chapter, three
years later, he is physically and psychologically broken.
Peace is an astonishing storyteller, if you can get beyond ‹ or take
pleasure from ‹ the crazy repetition, the diversions from the plot and the
chapters of italics and capital letters. One spectacularly odd interlude
near the end is a frenzied rant ascribed to ³The Thirty-Six Wounds of a
Second Detective² which reads typographically as a deranged chant: ³I AM THE
SPECTATOR, THEY ARE THE SPECTACLE Ten bodies, ten corpses, the sound of
whispering, the sound of weeping THE CRIME, THE SPECTACLE . . .²
But we had been warned. A quote from Artaud¹s The Theatre and the Plague
opens the novel (³The obedient and virtuous son kills his father . . .The
warrior hero sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save²) and
foreshadows the kind of dystopia that Peace¹s novel evokes, where all order
and reasonable conduct has been vaporised.
War and its discontents have perverted everything and everybody in Occupied
City: the bank poisonings are the most horrendous manifestation of that.
Tokyo¹s air is ³haunted², the city is a ³coffin², a wilderness, a site of
plague, a wound ‹ and much more besides. This novel is like a roiling
charnel house. You feel its grit, bitterness and lack of hope, with an awful
tangibility.
When the killer, or supposed killer, is revealed, his story links the
Teikoku Bank murders and the wider calumny of Japan¹s biological weapons
programme. But his confession is questionable; and the reader leaves this
chapter of Japan¹s history with, possibly, the wrong man convicted and the
truth about chemical warfare muddied and lost in time. But, throughout,
Peace has emphasised that this is an act of storytelling more than
truth-telling, ³the writer² playing fast and loose in Tokyo¹s most resonant
manifestation: ³the fictional city². This is a savagely beautiful, richly
startling novel, just begging to be made into a ³gritty Bafta².
Occupied City by David Peace (Faber and Faber, £12.99; Buy this book; 275pp)
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