By Spencer Cawein Pate
The greatest difficulty in writing about David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet—comprised of the novels 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983—derives from the attempt to find new synonyms for the word black. These books are so dark that no light can escape their gravitational pull; they push crime fiction beyond the visible spectrum and into the infra-noir: the noir as black hole.
I read mystery and crime fiction only rarely. In this case, I was intrigued by a British film adaptation of the quartet but had no way of viewing it, so I did the next best thing and picked up 1974.
I’m glad I did. I burned through this exhilarating novel in one sitting, and at the end, I instantly ordered the next three books in the series. By the time I finished all four, I had decided that the Red Riding Quartet sits alongside Roberto Bolaño’s oeuvre, some of Thomas Pynchon’s later works, and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and C as the finest works of fiction yet published during my lifetime. Indeed, the comparisons to Bolaño’s 2666 in particular are remarkable. Both works are massive in size, scope, and density; both offer us a cryptic vision of an occulted history, continually pushing us toward some hideous revelation; and both should be read as philosophical detective novels, enquiries into the nature of evil and fate. (And it’s also worth mentioning that neither book should be read by the squeamish, the faint-hearted, or the easily exhausted / distracted. Neither Peace nor Bolaño flinch in their frequent, precise, and graphic depictions of brutality, physical and otherwise.)
While I’ve decided to discuss the aesthetics of the Red Riding Quartet rather than its narrative details—because ultimately it’s the affective qualities that linger in the reader’s memory—some brief plot background is necessary. Set in the north of England before and during the bleak reign of Margaret Thatcher, Peace’s novels concern the real-life Yorkshire Ripper, who killed only women and prostitutes, and a fictional set of particularly horrific child abductions and murders.
Each book is similarly structured. The protagonist(s) of each is an investigator—a journalist, detective, policeman, or lawyer—with a relentless drive to seek the truth, even at great personal costs. They probe these crimes, gather vast amounts of information, suffer for it, and finally uncover a web of conspiracy, corruption, and crime that spans the whole of society. In the world of the Red Riding Quartet, absolutely no one—politicians, businessmen, policemen, the legal system, the media, organized religion, not even the main characters—is innocent. Nearly everyone is deeply flawed, both victim and victimizer. Peace’s protagonists are like Icarus, soaring too close to a black sun and sacrificing their lives, loves, and sanity in the pursuit of knowledge which will ultimately destroy them. They immolate themselves, and others, in the act of touching the real. Each novel is the record of a eventual failure.
(Needless to say, these stories don’t have happy endings.)
The Red Riding Quartet, like the film Zodiac or “The Part About the Crimes” section of 2666, drowns the reader with a flood of facts, dizzies her with a constellation of multiple perspectives. The plot is driven by information as much as by action; these books climax with the apprehension of connections, which are as metaphysical as they are logical. Even in the first novel, which is the most lurid and conventional, the violent narrative events resonate on a religious, even supernatural level. The margins of these texts are haunted by demons, angels, and ghosts; the story with rats, swans, and wolves.
But at the end of the stunning final book, during which we have looped back through time and woven in and out of the previous books’ aporias, we are granted a successful, satisfying dénouement without any real sense of resolution. Instead, we collapse into a narrative black hole, with only a brief glimpse of potential redemption–of the System as non-All–to save us from utter hopelessness. In the midst of what is perhaps the most hallucinatory and fractured (really, I’m tempted to say artfully confusing) extended finale to any novel I’ve ever read, Peace gives us one character’s last mystical vision of a solar eclipse: after four novels in which we have been dragged through the darkest abysses of man’s inhumanity, we learn that the diabolical evil we have witnessed is but a shadow: it could not have been cast without the radiant light of pure divine goodness. It should be noted, though, that Peace’s religious vision is one of transcendence, not of gnosis: the sinful, material world may seem like a prison, or an asylum for the mad, but another world is (or was once) possible. Man is perhaps not innately innocent, but he can be honorable.
Nevertheless, this is not to say that the Red Riding Quartet is only a Christian allegory. Attuned as he is to the relationship between politics, economics, and violence, Peace is also perhaps George Orwell’s most talented heir. It’s highly significant that the Red Riding Quartet stops poignantly short of the ominous date of 1984, which is the limit to which his shocking scenes of torture and murder (at the hands of police, the state, and capital) approach. Peace shows us the dead bodies in the foundation on which history is built. By the end, his unforgettably vivid setting of northern Britain during those twelve terrible years—in which racism, sexism, oppression, and all kinds of exploitation were seemingly omnipresent features of everyday life—feels as though it has become part of our collective past. We feel as though we have witnessed the bloody birth of the modern world in all of its boredom and horror.
Aesthetically, Peace’s writing is at times superficially reminiscent of James Ellroy’s prose: short, jagged sentence fragments and a numbing use of repetition. It is as sharp and depthless as an obsidian mirror. All of these elements work to create a sense of narrative momentum, making Peace and Ellroy’s novels compulsively readable. However, Peace is more of a proper modernist than Ellroy, accomplishing the literary passage from objectivity to subjectivity. In the pursuit of journalistic verisimilitude, Ellroy intersperses faux-documentary sources into the text and almost exclusively favors declarative sentences, adding to the illusion of realism. Peace is a fundamentally more complex and polyphonic stylist, privileging dialogue over description and giving us rich insight into the minds of his characters through interior monologue and even some astonishing passages of stream-of-consciousness (in the incredible second and third novels of the quartet). He marshals an array of spectral voices, a litany of names, a chorus of the living and the dead; his texts echo with radio transcripts, tape recordings, song lyrics, ominous recurring phrases, even psychic transmissions from beyond the grave.
The pervasive cynicism of noir fiction can sometimes curiously reverse into its opposite, a kind of perverse romanticism. And what’s even stranger is that only a glimmer of hope, of redemptive potential, can prevent this from happening. The writer must plot a difficult course if he or she wishes to avoid falling into one of two opposite temptations: either a revel in diabolical evil which thus obscures mundane systemic evils—the obscene violent underside of power—or a lapse into bad faith, into a worldview of corruption so inescapable that no alternative is possible. By contrast, Peace’s approach recognizes the unity of opposites. The most terrifying antagonist, who espouses a kind of cultish gnostic philosophy, condenses spiritual / metaphysical evil and complete ethical corruption into one figure; a businessman destroys lives for both his own twisted desires and for the construction of his buildings; a secret meeting of authority figures inaugurates a reign of crime and exploitation; and a subterranean realm of horror is mirrored by the torture chambers of the jailhouse basements. The Law is founded with crime, attaching to it a pervasive stain, a permanent shadow.
The Red Riding Quartet is noir burned down to its ashes. David Peace leads us into an underground kingdom, but he also whispers to us how we can dig ourselves out.
