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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling, thought-provoking thriller, 21 Jun 2004
I found Devil's Playground to be an engrossing, compelling read from the first page to the last. It's the story of a city (Amsterdam) under the spell of a sadistic serial killer, of the legacy of the Holocaust, of careless words, of the histories we are born into and the violence that surrounds us every day. The characters are deeply flawed in the best possible way, brimming with humanity and deflected dreams.
Detective Van Hijn is a man apparently caught in a terminal decline, left licking his wounds after gunning down a suspect in the slayings who turned out to be innocent (at least of being the serial killer, but not of being a particularly vicious rapist - such moral ambiguity litters this book); he struggles not to have the case taken from him and being left behind a desk with an ignominious retirement beckoning.
Londoner Jon Reed has fallen to pieces after a stinging record review he wrote caused the artist to kill himself. After years in freefall, a turning point in his life comes when he decides to take in a homeless man from the street, the mysterious Jake, who appears to be harbouring a few secrets of his own with his strange, grotesquely scarred body and his terse manner.
When Jake disappears only to turn up dead a few weeks later in Amsterdam, apparently the latest victim of the serial killer, a path is set that will lead Jon across the channel, to the seemingly limitless hedonism of Amsterdam's red light district, to snuff movies and footage purportedly of the camp at Auschwitz, and to most of all, the truth - not only of what happened to Jake, but also within the shadows of Jon's own past. So, yeah, there are some big ideas explored here - Does exposure to atrocity help us 'understand' it, or does it desensitise us? What is the proper reaction to violence, to turn away and survive, or protest and die? - But these are never considered at the expense of the story or the characters that lead us through it. Like a skilled surgeon, Sherez exposes the lingering tumours of the Twentieth Century, drawing us in with a fantastically plotted story, rich in detail and atmosphere and hands-down brilliant writing ("We cannot erase our history, like snails we only manage to smear it behind us"). Yet despite all this, Devil's Playground is touched with an unmistakable optimism; characters come to find a (limited) sense of peace in the stray shafts of light that pierce the gloom of their world. In a lovely exchange towards the end of the book, Van Hijn tells Jon after listing a number of places where some small happiness might be found (discovering a rare book cheaply, the taste of fresh pastry, a great song you hadn't expected to hear), "You have to say to yourself, 'It doesn't get any better than this', because if you don't say it at those moments, when are you going to say it? Those are the things that count." After all we've been through by that point in the book, any kind of redemptive light is most welcome, and perhaps most realistically, all we ourselves can expect.
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by Stav Sherez
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