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

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.

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.

I just finished reading the final book in the series and felt compelled to write ( for the first time ) a review of the books. Opinion seems divided amongst other reviewers regarding these books and I can understand why.

The setting for the book Yorkshire is constructed to appear a bleak, desolate landscape, hell on earth (I'm sure isn't as bad as Mr Peace makes out). This bleak landscape is continued through the books and is a fundamental and engaging part of the stories.

The characters are vivid and multi-layered,best decribed as anti-heroes. As you would expect with a series,a large number of characters are involved yet with most of them, very little is ever learned, apart from the fact everyone appears corrupt. This is a shame. There is an engaging quality to them and a need to more but this never comes. Their pasts, their motives etc,these explanations never materialise and I personally found this unrewarding.

The staccato writing style has been mentioned by several other reviewers,some praise some criticise. I would definately say it's a different and an original approach to anything else I have read of late, so far that I praise the author. Yet, the repetitive and cut and paste style does start to irritate.If you like James Ellroy,you'll be on familiar ground here but infinately it's style lacks some substance, I did start to skim through some sections trying to get to the main points and revelations in the story.

The storylines do move along at a fast pace. It's all cloak and daggers stuff,hints and secrets are slowly unravelled in the series. Story and character revelations are drawn out but you do start to feel there's alot of filler here with a storyline buried in there somewhere.

There is however something deeply compelling about the storyline. There is a need to know more, who is responsible for the murders and the abuse that take place and a need to know what is their ultimate fate. I cannot deny the books keep your attention, such is your need for answers. Yet in the end, the books failed to deliver anything near a satisfactory ending. Too many loose ends and too many unanswered questions. I feel ultimately disapointed, the final book with it's interweving storylines sets it up for the big ending and then it fails to deliver. So so disappointed. A pity.