FICTION: Occupied CityBy David Peace Faber&Faber, 274pp. £12.99
IN HIS distinctively thorough, scorched-earth way, the Yorkshire-born writer David Peace has covered a lot of ground since publishing his first novel, the opening salvo in what became known as the Red Riding Quartet, a decade ago.
Titled, simply enough, 1974, 1977, 1980and 1983, the books in the quartet, strongly influenced by James Ellroy, anatomised in grisly detail his native county's institutional seediness and corruption around the time of the Ripper murders, and somewhat misleadingly caused Peace to be labelled a crime writer.
His subsequent novels, though, showed the broader scale of his ambitions, as he trained his urgent, relentless prose style and his appetite for research on recognisable events and personalities from recent British history.
First there was GB84, in which he combined (not altogether successfully) the conspiratorial atmosphere of a political thriller with bleak, ground-level realism in his account of the miners' strike. And then, showing he was unfazed by the perennial failure of sport, and especially soccer, to make good fiction, came The Damned Utd.
This latter book, in which Peace dares to imagine the interior world of the sacred Brian Clough during his doomed attempt to master the dark forces represented by Leeds United FC in 1974, succeeded in offending most of its surviving featured characters, from the Clough family to Johnny Giles, but also won a wider audience for Peace’s work.
Following this year's film version of the book, with Michael Sheen as Clough, and the recent TV adaptation of the Red Riding Quartet, Peace is now probably the highest-profile name of those on Granta's2003 list of Britain's 20 best young novelists.
One of his strengths, clearly, is his eye for a story (even when you disagree with the way he sees it), and his ability to find material with an instant appeal for his home audience shows no sign of faltering (among projected future books are ones about cricketer Geoffrey Boycott and the early years of Thatcherism). But, interestingly, all his British-themed work so far has been accomplished from a great distance, recalled and researched from the other side of the world, from Tokyo in fact, where Peace has lived for a number of years and where he was a teacher of English before becoming a full-time writer. And it is only very recently that he has began to shift his creative focus to the less familiar world of his adoptive home, where his latest novel is set.
Occupied Cityfollows Tokyo Year Zeroin a projected trilogy of novels based on notorious real-life crimes in the immediate post-war period when Japan was under US occupation.
Again, Peace has unearthed a remarkable story to support his new book, but he has also taken on a political background of rich complexity, more than sufficient to satisfy his taste for intrigue and test the irrepressible grimness of his style.
The novel gets off to an atmospheric start as a storytelling game is set up in the ruins of the still-devastated Tokyo. Apparently once treated as a test of nerve among the Samurai, the game involves the telling of increasingly harrowing supernatural tales until, one by one and story by story, all the candles which illuminate proceedings are extinguished and the participants are in complete darkness.
Into this flickering world, Peace invokes the spirits of his protagonists, who describe, from differing viewpoints, the events surrounding the Teikoku Bank Massacre of 1948.
The details of the mass murder on which they all agree are these: a man claiming to be a doctor has entered a downtown bank, warning employees of a local outbreak of dysentery. He has, he says, been sent by the occupation authorities to treat anyone who may have come into contact with the disease. He then supervises the 16 members of staff as they drink the supposedly medicinal liquid he has brought with him. A few minutes later, 12 of the workers are dead, poisoned, and their killer has made off with some, though not all, of the bank’s money.
Beyond these bare, if extraordinary, facts, everything is uncertain: the identity of the killer, his physical characteristics, his motives and those of the authorities who are so keen to make a particular, probably erroneous arrest. But as the huddled witnesses in the storytelling game give their candlelit evidence, the murders come to seem connected with the wider political situation, and increasingly sinister scenarios start to emerge, involving biological-weapons experiments on civilians and cover-ups by the past and present authorities.
Peace’s research has obviously been extensive, and the investigations have the feel of authenticity, but what seems to matter most to him in this extremely uneven novel is what he is doing with language.
Away from his native English terrain, with its mass of familiar detail demanding to be included, he is free to fill in the cultural gaps by experimenting with different voices or by honing his starkly repetitive but increasingly lyrical style. As well as trying to create a rounded political picture of his subject, as he has done in his earlier books, it seems he is also concerned to distil its emotional essence, to poetically invoke the sorrow and grief of a place and time.
A consequence of this, after a purposeful beginning, is that the narrative gradually loses tension, and there are sections that risk dispensing with the reader altogether, including a 40-page chapter made up largely of sequences of repeated phrases in the chaotic mind of a crazed detective.
While Occupied Cityconfirms Peace as an original and fast-developing voice, as a whole it feels like a transitional piece of work. It seems likely that his best is yet to come, and it will be interesting to see what emerges when he next applies his evolving poetry to the English themes that seem to engage him more fully.
Giles Newington is an Irish Timesjournalist