David Peace, Novelist

To be honest, not knowing anything about the story made it better it some ways. I couldn't figure out how exactly he was going to get from Derby to Leeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_EHlzd63R8

There is one scene in the book where he tells a story about Frank Sinatra and he says something like "I don't want to namedrop but he met me once, you know."

So, Occupied City is out now. Haven't read it myself, but Mark Sanderson has reviewed it for the Telegraph. I'm guessing this is the first David Peace book he's dipped into:

"Fans of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet will be hugely disappointed[...]What really sinks the novel, though, is the endless repetition. 'I am falling, I am falling, I am falling,/I am falling, I am falling,/I am falling’, bleats a survivor, but the words could equally apply to Peace himself."

The repetition can get wearying, and definitely approaches self-parody at times (the "Guilty feet got no rhythm. Guilty feet got no rhythm." bit in GB84 took me straight out of the book), but at this stage - eight books in - you kinda know what you're getting with Peace. "Endless repetition" is part of the deal, for better or worse.

He does ramp it up a lot in the Tokyo ones to the point where you can't really bring yourself to read over a page of the same phrase repeated just to let it have whatever awesome effect he thinks it'll have on you.

Amazon reviews for Peace's book are frequently funny, like housewives going "I was led to expect some quality crime thriller but this is just an excuse for foul language!!! Disgraceful", like they saw an advert for it on the tube and expected some mildly edgy Patricia Cornwell shit.

There's a long review in the new LRB that has some good points but you need to be a subscriber to see it online.

BAD FUCKING BOWIE

i don't think i like him much, got one and a half books into red riding and gave them away. but whenever i am reminded of him the phrase 'bad fucking bowie' pops into my mind, and i am so pointlessly amused that i can't bring myself to actually dislike david peace

I've only read 1974, is this repetition thing something he developed later on or am I just that oblivious?

In the very beginning of that one there is a kind of repetition when Eddie Dunford is mentallly writing his article about the family's "emotional plea."

I like what MPx4A has to say. I just don't find the repetition particularly well done, let alone effective "voices" for his narrators. I think he actually works best when he's tackling something more mundane and less crimey like Damned Utd. I'd like to see him do a Houellebecq-style novella about a bored computer programmer, rather than read about a detective or other crime-solver or committer who seems impossibly driven on every page to vaguely plow forward through some kind of murky affect and vague illness. It sometimes reads less like a character's mind going in loops than an author kind of ostentatiously talking over his own characters' voices.

Red Riding films will be playing NY Film Fest. First I've heard of em.

I thought this was going to be an RIP Gordon Burn revive.

I just read a Joyce Carol Oates book called Beasts and for a while near the end it turned into a David Peace novel. I starting hearing the phrase "B. F. Bowie" in the back of my head. It was really kind of chilling to think that he had reappeared yet again, this time in college town New England.

Heavy manners coming down
Heavy manners coming down
Heavy country matters coming down

Or something like that.

PROSTITUTE MURDER SQUAD

so red riding is good or what? have a chance to go see a press screening next week and it sounds right up my alley

I found them a massive disappointment in the end, but might have felt differently if I'd never read the books, or if I was a US dude who wanted to see how massively grim Northern England could be in the 70s.

And what a massive cliche "massively grim Northern England in 70s" has become. The 80s were grimmer.

just watched the first one--wayyyy over the top w/ all the "grittiness" signifiers, felt pretty self-parodic at times. the fairly well-trodden storyline was actually a plus since it allowed me to follow the movie despite understanding 60% of the dialogue at best.

even so--camerawork was beautiful and ill watch sean bean in anything

so senile david thomson says it's better than the godfather, because he's a fucking moron, in the NYRB. and now that quote adorns the ads.

the third one was so far beyond bad. in the meantime i've read some peace and wasn't super-impressed by that even, but the films didn't catch his, um, apocalyptic worldview.

it has a great cast (ie rebecca hall) and it looks p good mostly (they overdo it, artiness-wise, as old thomson once would have spotted).

2nd one is by a long shot the best

photography is quite pretty but the scripts are really... eugh

yep. paddy considine is great. the ending is still ridic imho.

xp

i watched them three nights in a row at christmas. was a real slog after the first one tbh.

looked rabishing though, as max says. loved the indian restaurant in particular. felt a lot like my first curry in bradford c.1986, without the shootout, obv.

Crashing disappointment to realise that, despite all the political intrigue and police corruption, it all came down to that old standby, the paedo ring.

Bugger, I should have SPOILER WARNINGed that. Mods feel free to delete.

despite all the political intrigue and police corruption, it all came down to that old standby, the paedo ring.

not mutually exclusive iirc. the bad guys are REALLY BAD.

The fat guy from The Full Monty was the best thing about this.

They should have made it super-trashy really. The endless signifiers of 'quality drama' really did it in. It was static where it should have been squirming.

alan bennett:

13 March. Red Riding is much talked of and applauded, and it is powerful and sometimes hard to watch. Whether it’s feasible or the assumptions about the police entirely plausible I’m inclined to doubt. ‘The Leeds police kick mainly in the teeth’ is the gist of it, plus an assumption that the force in the 1970s was thoroughly corrupt.

Though the circumstances were hardly as lurid, this was very much the assumption when I was a boy. Rationing offered increased opportunities for peculation and my father, a butcher, who was both Conservative and conservative, nevertheless always assumed that most policemen were ‘on the take’ and the magistrates, too. Still, though the police get away with extreme violence and even murder, I find it hard to credit (if I understand the plot) that masked bobbies could shoot up a club or beat up and rape a reporter on the Yorkshire Post without there being some sort of repercussions. Comically, since in my memory the Yorkshire Post was always rather a genteel newspaper, I’d find it easier to believe if the reporter had been from the Yorkshire Evening Post – the newspaper Keith Waterhouse first worked on as a reporter.

So while Red Riding seems like gritty realism it is in this respect quite romantic, as romantic and fanciful as the stories told at the other end of the social and geographical scale in Midsomer Murders. In Midsomer the murders average three or four per episode but never seem to incur any comment in the press or ruffle the calm surface of the community. It takes more than the discovery of a mere body to stop the garden fête. Midsomer and Red Riding are not very different in this and alike, too, in that they’re both, Midsomer particularly, a boon to actors.

I really love Midsomer Murders. The plots are nuts.

raw patrick otm. i think the series was very confused w/r/t quality. maybe people are generally. it's not just about seeing that there are "virtues in pulp", but also that these are different virtues from what you look for in yer proverbial high art. doing pulp-as-art-movie -- im not saying it's never a good idea. but you have to know what you're doing.

xpost

what's the alan bennett thing from? is that the whole thing or an extract?

really wanted to like these but i couldn't make any sense of it at all and was unable to decipher more than a third or so of the dialogue. btu great acting nonetheless and, yes, it looked rabishing.

LRB, they publish extracts from his diaries at xmas and that was one entry.

ok, cheers.

d thomson part of a sinister critics ring - along w/ the editor of sight and sight (whose mrs worked on the series!) and senile old k-punk - to seriously overpraise these progs

[controversial self-edit] yeah basically sight and sound contributor k-punk was presumably sucking up to his editor? idk what's in it for thomson – is he still trading on "being british"? it might be that.

I can reveal as well as being part of an over-praising ring they are also paedos and will kick you in teeth whilst down. They will probably scuttle me for telling you this though.

Occupied City is. . . good (first book of his I've read). Writing sometimes get a bit too much for me. I'd heard nothing about this particular case (the Teigin Bank Murders) before reading it either and wow what an off-the-wall one it is.

Not strictly relevant but has anyone here read 'Heartland' by Anthony Cartwright? Picked it up on a whim the other day and I'm only about 50 pages in but it's very David Peace - football, declining post-industrial towns, grass roots politics, etc etc.

It seems to be all based around the England-Argentina game in World Cup 2002, very enjoyable so far. Got the feeling it's building up to some very nasty racial tension stuff though.

Okay I've now finished 1/2 the Red Riding Quartet (had to skip 1980 cuz the library didn't have) and am reading 1983 right now. These are undeniably great books. Very much of the LA Quartet, but frankly better written and less repetitive. Having trouble keeping track of what happen in 1974 in 1983 though. Also read Tokyo Year Zero which was good... but I wish like Occupied City it had been a little less dense and exhausting. Setting and the crimes alone makes both of those worth a read.

Curious to read Damned Utd and GB84 although neither seems to have received an American press so I guess I'll have to buy 'em.

watched red riding 1974 a couple weeks ago and thought it was good but nonsensical in a way the novel wasn't i.e. dunford didn't seem to actually discover anything of great importance, it was like an incompetent james bond running around not being very good at his job, and the villains growing bored and kidnapping him in order to have a cathartic showdown and tell him they were the ones he was looking for, leading to big reveals and lots of blood. still good imo. 1980 was a lot better, mainly because the story was more smoothly told and paddy considine was a superior lead character and actor. 1983 coming up next. this shit is so OTT it's ridiculous but i'm "enjoying" it.

GB84 is maybe half way to being a great book... the stream of consciousness ground-level strike action material that's constantly running in the background is fantastic, insighful, atmospheric. The bits about the CEO aren't bad.

The bits about The Jew fall flat because he can't empathise with him enough to make him anything other than a mildly fleshed-out pantomime villain. The neo-Nazi gangster subplot is ridiculous and has no dramatic tension whatsoever for something with such a high body and betrayal count.

I feel like some sort of scabs-eye perspective was missing and it was a big oversight.

I was really disappointed with the series: I lost interest with each episode.

'1983' was pretty good but for some reason the filmmakers decided to not answer 99% of the questions left over from '1980.' oh well.

1974 film is quite ludicrous. As for Andrew Garfield, never send a boy to do a star's job.

GB84. Read it now. Oh, you can't - it's not out for another fortnight.

::hugs own proof copy like a miser::

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 27 February 2004 16:54 (6 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Erm, I saw it in Waterstone's window this very lunch break...

― ENRQ (Enrique), Friday, 27 February 2004 16:59 (6 years ago) Bookmark

i'm still totally confused by 1983's insistence on not answering any of the leftover questions from 1980 other than 'what's the deal with the creepy priest?' they could have never made 1980 and the two bookend films would have existed just fine without it.

I can't even remember what the leftover questions from 1980 were??!?! The books only made a marginal amount of sense so I guess it's not too surprising that a series that removed one of them altogether would also be a mess.