Nineteen Eighty: Red Riding Quartet (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Peace's Red Riding Quartet is rapidly turning from The British Crime Series into the best British Quartet ever, regardless of genre. I have never read anything quite like it. Each book is different from the last and they just get better and better. Nineteen Seventy Four was full on,in yer face Ultra Noir, Seventy Seven was like Dickens imagining Ellroy in an opium dream. And Eighty, well you just want to read the first so-called Transmission. From the British Ellroy to the New Dante in two books. This man is our best writer, period. Read him.

David Peace has carved himself a niche in contemporary English fiction, by taking real events and turning them into intensely personal and disturbing narratives. In the process he has proved himself to be a stylish and highly distinctive writer. True, his work can be an acquired taste and at times veers into the obscure, but there aren't many writers at work today who have such a personally developed voice.

1980 is the third part of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, set in the north of England between 1974 and 1983. Like the books before it, 1980 is set in a world of corruption and violence, and like the previous two installments features a protagonist struggling with the horror of the reality before him whilst battling his own personal demons.

Peter Hunter is an Assistant Chief Constable in Manchester, sent over to Leeds to ostensibly help in the search for the Yorkshire Ripper, but also to critically study the investigations that have gone before.

As in all of the quartet a familiar cast of characters weave in and out of the plot, Bob Craven, The Dawson family, Maurice Jobson, Jack Whitehead, and their actions in the first two books have repercussions here.

Anyone who has read 1974 and 1977 will recognise the frenetic pace, the intensity of the internal monologue and the visceral, violent subject matter. This, more than the others can stand alone as a piece of fiction. Although it would help to have an understanding of the whole set you could pick this novel up and appreciate it as a singular novel.

To me though, this is the most accomplished out of 1974, 1977 and 1980. Peace seems more in control of his style and story than in the previous books. While he has maintained the hallucinatory style there is more clarity to the subject matter, and although this is not an easy read it is certainly more so than its predecessors. 1977 in particular suffered in this respect, having two narrators and a lack of differentiation between their voices.

1980 feels more restrained, if you could ever refer to Peace's work as restrained. His trademark repetition is used to a brilliant effect, particularly in the breathless, exhilarating finale. In the final third of the book, where his style usually obliterates the content, he expertly crafts a series of twists that never seem contrived, but instead clarify and justify that which has come before.

I finished this book with my jaw on the table and if you are unsure about reading it after struggling through 1974 and 1977, I would strongly urge you to do so. This is a whisker away from being a masterpiece.

The third in Peace's series of dark and dirty police thrillers, set in West Yorkshire and definitely the best so far. Covering the year in which the Yorkshire Ripper was at last apprehended, the novel adheres very closely to the facts of the case, going back in great detail over all of the Ripper's killings. Peace changes the names of the victims, some of the locations (but not all) and the identities of people most involved in the case. George Oldfield, becomes George Oldman, Peter Sutcliffe becomes Peter Williams. Oldfield's fixation on the Ripper tape and a man with a Geordie accent is covered, as are the details of many of Sutcliffe's crimes, his modus operandi and his background as a lorry driver.

There is an over-reliance, as in the other books in this series, on a kind of lyrical frenzy for effect, but this time it seems at least partly justified. As anyone who lived through the "Ripper years" could testify, the shock and disbelief as the killings mounted leant a kind of hyper-reality to the fall of night, especially towards the end of the series of murders, when Sutcliffe was as likely to murder a woman nipping to the shops as a prostitute plying her trade.

There is less gratuitous obscenity in this third book, perhaps because the reality of these obscene crimes renders it redundant. The main protagonist is another copper - and the background of corruption and cynicism is ever-present, but this time it seems muted. Perhaps not every copper in the force is bent?

The Ripper denied doing some of the murders the police had him down for, and in this novel Peace pins them on a corrupt copper. Suicides are abundant, cover-ups just par for the course. It is a dark, disturbing vision of the business of being a detective in the English police force. Having read this book, one could be forgiven for eyeing every policeman with dread and suspicion.