Vertigo

Dec 24

A Final Word on David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

“There’s no end to it is there?”

In his Red Riding Quartet of novels, written between 1999 and 2002, David Peace’s West Yorkshire is a self-contained universe where corrupt police can create mayhem, torture and then frame men for crimes they didn’t commit, and even murder a few of their own constituents with impunity. It’s a place where a pedophile can trap and murder young girls and a small group of local businessmen can conduct a pornography business and other criminal activities on the side while the police look the other way. Only the occasional song—Bowie, Elton John, Bay City Rollers, Tom Jones—or Christmas carol or piece of news heard on someone’s car radio, lets the reader know that a world exists a few miles beyond Leeds, Bradford, and a few small West Yorkshire villages. In this isolated world, it falls to a series of little guys—a couple of young reporters, an attorney who is an overweight drunk, and a cop who has soured on his colleagues—to become crusaders for justice and take on the corrupt police. But each one of these well-meaning but ill-prepared zealots goes off the rails and dies or becomes grievously harmed. The only form of justice in the Quartet is violence.

When we, on occasion, are reminded that a world exists outside the West Yorkshire bubble, Peace paints a very dour image of Britain. The news often concerns the latest bombing by the IRA or some bit of bad economic news from London. 1977 was the year of the Royal Jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne. Royal parties and other royal celebrations make an ironic backdrop to the violence and murders that fill the pages of 1977. The Quartet was Peace’s warning for an England that seemed to be teetering on the brink. The Irish Republican Army was terrorizing the country with bombs and attempted assassinations, while the Conservative Party was squeezing the population with its austerity budgets.

The one tiny island of calm among the mayhem and prevailing atmosphere of fear in the Quartet is the Rev. Matthew Laws, a deliberately mysterious man who promises to provide a solution to anyone’s anxieties, but who has the unfortunate penchant for driving nails into the top of people’s skulls. In a world in which the rule of law does not operate, only the Rev. Laws can promise solace and peace. Even his name suggests that he is providing what the police and the government cannot. Laws is a minor character who appears sporadically in the last three books of the Quartet, but he acts like a hidden thread that reveals the shared fears and morbid desires of many of the main characters.

Early in 1977, the reporter Jack Whitehead desperately phones Rev. Laws after the image of a dead woman named Carol who has holes in her head relentlessly haunts him. Whitehead and Laws meet for tea. Laws asks the Turkish waiter about his family and it becomes obvious that he has helped get the man’s son into a certain school. The waiter places a small envelope in Laws’ hands.

“Mehmet, I couldn’t. There is no need.”
“Father, I insist.”

Nothing quite like this small act of mutual care and generosity between the two men happens anywhere else in the more than 1,400 pages of the Quartet. And yet, Whitehead is meeting with Laws because of what happened several years earlier, “the night Michael Williams cradled Carol in his arms one last time.” That night in January 1975, a man named Michael Williams had gone to Rev. Laws for an exorcism because he thought he was possessed. But something went wrong during the exorcism and, instead, Williams attacked and killed his own wife Carol by driving 12” nails into her head. Carol, it turns out, was Whitehead’s lover at the time. “I was there, remember?” Whitehead tells Rev. Laws, “the night you fucked up?” But, as bitter as Whitehead is toward Laws, he knows that he still needs him.

I said, “I want it to stop.”
“I know you do. And it will, believe me.”
“Is there only that way. The one way.”
“I have a room. We can go upstairs right now and it’ll be all over.”

But Whitehead isn’t ready yet.

But after a few more brutal deaths and suicides, Whitehead has changed his mind and is desperate for inner peace. He visits Rev. Laws, who begins by cutting his hair.

“Something for the weekend?”
“Just a little off the top,” I smiled.

While Rev. Laws recites a version of Psalms 77:19, “Thy way is the sea, and thy path is the great waters, and thy footsteps are unknown,” he picks up a screwdriver and a hammer, and pounds the former into Whitehead’s skull. (Clues dropped throughout the Quartet tell us that Rev. Laws had a long history of violence that preceded this episode.)

In the end, even Rev. Laws receives his own violent justice. He is stabbed to death by a black male prostitute and police stool pigeon, a man named Barry James Anderson (or BJ for blow job). BJ is the “one that got away and lived to tell the tale” (at least up to this moment). As he kills Rev. Laws, he wails out a page-long litany of those he is doing this for, “Hazel Atkins and every missing child . . . my old mum and Queen sodding Mum . . . for that knife in my heart and this one in you.” He then steps over the dead body of Rev. Laws “into red rain, white floodlights, and police lights blue,” his shotgun ready to fire at those waiting for him outside.

Admittedly, the graphic violence in the Quartet is tough. There is no way around it. Peace describes in clinical (or gory) detail how multiple women and young girls are attacked, raped, battered, and mutilated by men. And we read as cops, determined to get confessions, torture (and in one case, kill) the men in their custody for page after page. The attacks on women are partly based on the real assaults and murders by Peter Sutcliffe, the real Yorkshire Ripper. So, in this sense, the Quartet might be seen as a quasi-documentary novel, transposing actual events into fiction.

It is possible, perhaps in a perverse way, to see the Quartet as Peace’s way of honoring the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper. In the “Transmissions from the office of the dead” portions of 1980, the Ripper’s victims take back their own murders from the Ripper and retell them from their own perspectives. Although he doesn’t use anyone’s real name in the books, the fictional women are brutalized and murdered in very similar ways to the real Ripper’s attacks on his fifteen victims. As agonizing and gruesome as the accounts are, these testimonies from the dead and the battered allow each victim to put forward their personal version of their encounter with the Yorkshire Ripper—their initial innocent first moments, then their confusion, shock, fear, and pain, and their post-attack anger. Even I grimace at the terrible details of torture and rape. Yet, every time I open one of the four volumes to find a quote or quickly check a detail, I find myself rereading many pages before I catch myself. In addition to the numerous intriguing plots and subplots, what makes the Quartet so compelling is Peace’s writing.

The Quartet is not experimental fiction, yet Peace draws upon literary devices from novels that are decidedly experimental. I’m thinking first of the minimalist, dynamic, almost cinematic aesthetic that dominates these four books. The most common way this appears is his use of the literary equivalent of jump cuts, in which he sometimes moves the reader through as many as a half dozen locations over the course of a page or two, always starting in media res, without setting up the scene or letting the reader know either the location or which characters are speaking. But Peace can do the other extreme just as well. In direct contrast to this minimalist style are the occasional outbursts of wild maximalism. These examples are almost always confessions or intensely dramatic inner monologues from characters who are paranoid or under intense pressure. Or they are polyphonic texts like the twenty-one page-long “transmissions from the office of the dead” found in 1980. These are word soups in which there is no continuity and any sense of meaning is wobbly at best.

The truth of the matter is that the Quartet is designed to confuse, to leave the reader partly in the dark. Among the rush of pronouns and the dearth of proper names, identities become murky. Even I, with my pages and pages of notes, get lost all the time. In fact, in my last post, about the book 1983, I wrote that Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson committed suicide at the end of the book. Unfortunately, that did not occur and I had to add a correction to the post. If the reader of the Quartet doesn’t recall what happened on a certain date or who lives at a specific address, it’s easy to miss out on helpful information the next time that date or address pops up. Peace wants the reader to be every bit as lost, fearful, and paranoid as the numerous victims and failed heroes that haunt his pages.

In the Quartet, the reader observes as a series of ineffective men try to play the hero against a world of ruthless, violent, hyper-masculine men. As, one by one they fail and die or become brutalized, the reader realizes she has been the only one to survive. This isn’t so much a who-done-it as it is an exercise in paranoia. As the wannabe-heroes witness obscene acts of violence, undergo torture, lose lovers or friends or families, and see their own options dwindle, the reader witnesses the extent to which their sanity and sense of justice becomes warped. And some of those justice-seekers decided to take justice into their own hands—with violence. Frequently, throughout the Quartet, I found myself no longer an observer but in the shoes of one of the hapless narrators, frightened out of my wits.

The four books of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet are page-turners, books that certainly could be enjoyed on a plane despite all my commentary on their complexities. But one reason that I wanted to give them six posts on Vertigo is that they can also elicit the utmost from a willing reader. As I have said in earlier posts: “Peace has us groping our way across the page,” “the Red Riding Quartet is a four-volume jigsaw puzzle,” “Peace demands an active reader.” This is reading as a contact sport.

The Quartet is book number 10 in my **Vertigo 15 Books Project**, which I began in 2022 as a way of looking back across fifteen years of writing **Vertigo**. I am selecting and rereading fifteen titles that have really stood out during that time. Part 6 of a 6 part series. The entire six-part essay may be read here.

Dec 9

David Peace’s 1983: “There will be justice and there will be vengeance”

“We’re all guilty.”

1983, the final book in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, is written in breathless, restless prose that reads almost like shorthand at times. Events happen quickly, characters speak in clipped, enigmatic phrases, past and present become easily confused, and, one by one, many of the unanswered questions from the previous three volumes become clear (or at least clearer), but only if the reader is paying close attention. Significant portions of 1983 are written as flashbacks, allowing the reader to relive some scenes that occurred earlier, many of which were encountered in 1974. But here, we see them from a different perspective, through the eyes of different characters, and thus finally grasp the larger implications that were invisible in the earlier reading. 1983 makes it clear the Red Riding Quartet is a four-volume jigsaw puzzle.

To be clear, it isn’t necessary to remember every detail to attain closure on the various minor mysteries that Peace has scattered throughout the Quartet to thoroughly enjoy the series. But if you are like me and want to tie up every loose end, you’ll need a good memory or you’ll want to take a good set of notes, or you might have to go back and reread 1974. Peace demands an active reader.

1983, like the second volume 1977,has co-narrators most of the time. One of them is John Piggott, a lawyer, who has been a minor character previously. Piggot is defending two men who have been tortured by the police and accused of murder. Both proclaim their innocence (and the reader knows they are innocent). By the end of the book Piggott will be a broken man, having been tortured by the police himself. The Quartet ends with him alone in his home about to commit suicide by slitting his wrists in his bath. The other narrator is Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson (known as The Owl for his eyeglasses) of the Greater Manchester police force. Jobson, as the reader will know all along, has helped orchestrate the major police cover-up which has been one of the key stories of the Quartet. But he, too, ends up broken, racked by guilt over the various roles that he has played. Jobson’s chapters are written from the perspective of first person, while Piggot’s chapters are written in an unusual second-person perspective, which places the reader right in his shoes.

As might be obvious, 1983 is the most complex of the four volumes. The book continually crisscrosses fifteen years’ worth of events, from 1969 to 1983. For the first time we learn the name of Peace’s fictional Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Williams, when a radio news reporter tells us that he has been attacked in prison by a fellow inmate. His arrest has occurred completely offstage and without notice, a reminder that his story is not the main theme of the Quartet. (The real Yorkshire Ripper, Peter William Sutcliffe, was arrested in 1981.) Much of 1983 occurs in the past and involves the murders of several children that we read about previously in 1974. We watch the attempts of the Greater Manchester police as they try to pin these on an innocent man, who has been beaten until he confessed. He later retracts his confession and is one of the two being represented by Piggott. But when another young girl goes missing and is eventually found murdered while he is in jail, the press becomes suspicious that he cannot really be the pedophile murderer, and the police become rattled. A second innocent man is arrested for this murder and he, too, is brutally tortured by the police. When Piggott arrives at the station to represent, bringing with him the man’s mother, they learn that the suspect is dead. He didn’t survive the police interrogation. At first it is not clear why the police are so intent on going to such lengths to get innocent men to admit guilt for these pedophile murders. But later we learn that back in 1969 Detective Chief Superintendent Jobson let the real pedophile go, and now he must shield the man because he is personally compromised by him due to illegal enterprises they have been involved in together.

As in each of the preceding volumes, there is a momentary hero, someone who decides to fight police corruption but will ultimately be destroyed. Piggott, the lawyer, is an overweight drunk, with unpleasant appetites, but he takes on cases when he believes someone is innocent. In 1983, the death of Ashworth at the hands of the Leeds police sends Piggott off the rails, and he is bent on revenge.

The scales falling, the Pig rising:
Lord, I’ve pierced my skin again.
But there will be no retreat, there will be no surrender—
There will be justice and there will be vengeance:
For through the holes the light shines.
Down the motorway, the up-rising Pig—
Hear them calling you, calling:
A holy light for a holy war.

But Piggott’s holy war and his call for justice will fail like each one in the Quartet before him. A sharp-eyed reader will notice that each one of Piggott’s twenty-six chapters a countdown number. On Saturday 14 May 1983, Piggott has “D-26” days left to live. Each of his chapters represents a day and is led off by the same countdown symbol—D-25, D-24, D-23. . . Here’s Piggott in his final day, defeated, as he prepares to kill himself.

The water is warm.
You see scenes; see the scenes as you could not at the time—
The shadows in your heart, the fear and the hate—
The hate and the fear.
You put all your fear and all your hate together and get:
Yorkshire, England, 1983.
You pick up the razor blade from the side of the bath:
My country, my country, right or wrong.
Four tears trickle down the sides of your nose.
But it’s all right, everything is all right, the struggle is finished—
The water is red.

Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson has seemed like an inscrutable, untouchable, but crooked senior cop in previous volumes. But in 1983, we learn not only about the secret crimes he has committed, but about the personal flaws that wrack him, about his passionate affair with a woman who is a mystic and whom he clearly loves far more than his wife. But, more than anything, he is eaten up by the guilt of letting the pedophile go free and accusing innocent men instead, one of whom has died in police custody.

We turn into Blenheim Road and I am filled again with hate—
. . .
I am filled with hate at me;
Hate at me for who and what I am—
What I know and will not do;
(Just a lullaby in the local tongue)—
Hate.

And so, 1983 and the Quartet ends. The books of the Quartet are variously described as crime novels, thrillers, “Northern Noir,” or simply as fiction. After all the violence—against women, against children, against innocent men—what, in the end, is the Quartet all about? Are these novels about violence? About evil? About paranoia? About the criminal mind? About England? Are they about masculinity, toxic or otherwise? The Quartet is big enough to absorb each of these motifs and more. For me, the motif of the Quartet that stands out is this: Peace repeatedly wants to to see what can happen when ordinary people, “good souls,” so to speak, come face-to-face with a level of evil they never thought existed before. What happens when a young reporter, whose girlfriend has just become pregnant, discovers a man who likes to photograph himself with the young girls he then rapes and kills? What happens when another reporter holds a woman in his arms as she dies, after witnessing someone drive a nail into her skull in an exorcism of some sort that has gone wrong? What happens to a reader who comes across descriptions of torture and brutalization she had never imagined before and might not really want to visualize over the course of four books? I will look all of this and more in one final upcoming post about David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet coming soon.

[NOTE: In an earlier version of this post I had written that “The lawyer and the Detective Chief Superintendent, co-narrators and opponents throughout the book, have both committed suicide.” This was an error. At the end of the book Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson is last seen in a church desperately praying to Jesus, as he imagines that he sees and talks to several characters from his past. “Will you rescue me from this body of death?” This just demonstrates my case that it is easy to get confused and mix characters up in the Quartet.]

Nov 14

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David Peace’s 1980: “The vast kingdom of grief”

“e cannot write e cannot tell memory and vocabulary not enough here neither dead nor alive before the king of the vast kingdom of grief. . .”

As David Peace’s novel 1980 opens, it is early December 1980 and the voice of Yoko Ono can be heard on the car radio of Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter of the Greater Manchester police force: “The 1980s are still going to be a beautiful time, and John believed it. This is not the end of an era.” John Lennon has just been assassinated in New York City, while in West Yorkshire, England, the Yorkshire Ripper has apparently just claimed his thirteenth victim. Hunter is the narrator throughout 1980. He has been sent to neighboring Bradford to review the progress of the Yorkshire Ripper investigations, because, not surprisingly, the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police Department has failed to make any material progress for six years. As Hunter and his own small team work on their investigation, they, like the co-narrators of 1977, the previous volume of Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, will uncover evidence of police cover-ups. Hunter believes that the murder of at least one prostitute whose death the police deliberately attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper was, in fact, killed by a member of their own police force. Hunter’s team is being guided through the extensive Ripper files by a policeman who is secretly reporting back to his superiors.

During Hunter’s investigation, several more brutal murders of women occur, but he becomes dubious of claims by the West Yorkshire police that the Ripper is responsible for all of them. Hunter also pays several visits to Jack Whitehead, the reporter who was one of the narrators of the previous volume and who is now cared for in an institution after having had a nail driven into his head by the enigmatic Reverend Laws. Whitehead, who had gone to Laws seeking relief from his own unbearable fear, guilt, and paranoia, can now barely communicate and can only give Hunter mysterious clues about what he might have learned about the police cover-ups. During one of these meetings, Hunter can barely restrain himself from touching the hole in the top of Whitehead’s skull. “I want to touch, to put a finger in that hole.” Hunter himself is beginning to become depressed. He and his wife have been unable to conceive a child and are growing apart. And he’s afraid that someone in the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police Department is trying to derail his investigation.

But before Hunter can act on any of his suspicions, several people knowledgeable about the police cover-up are murdered, including one man and his young daughter who are savagely killed. Not long after that, he is relieved of duty and his home is mysteriously burnt to the ground with all his files in it.

Each of the twenty-one chapters in 1980 begins with a full-page text block of “transmissions from the office of the dead.” Combined, this twenty-one page-long passage is a single, rambling sentence without punctuation or capitalization. This polyphonic transmission encapsulates for us graphic on-the-scene accounts of some of the violent murders and attacks perpetuated by the Ripper and by unknown others, shifting from segments narrated by the victims to the Ripper himself and then to other unidentified voices. It also includes quotations from the texts of police and autopsy reports. The transmission’s voice can shift from first person to third person within a few words and is often written in a very colloquial language: “e took the hammer from my pocket . . . e stabbed her in the lungs her eyes still open she seemed to be looking at me with an accusing stare which shook me up a bit so he stabbed her in the eye the taste of the chicken in my mouth.” At times the voice addresses the Ripper directly: “you are the ripper why are you not married who does your washing if you are not married do you like women have you ever been with a whore.” At other times, the Ripper teases various policemen by name for their ineptitude: “your boys are letting you down George they cannot be much good can they the only time they came near catching me was a few months back in chapeltown. . .” There are numerous Biblical (or Biblical-sounding) quotations, including a request for forgiveness: “hear my voice o lord let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications . . .” There are references to pop culture, including mentions of the television crime drama Kojak, which ran from 1973 to 1978, the television action series Starsky & Hutch, which ran from 1975 to 1979, the 1968 Jane Fonda film Barbarella, and the 1970 J.G. Ballard book Atrocity Exhibition.

you are lucky to be alive to be alive to be alive but cut this wood and the blood turns darks around the wound and from the splintered trunk pours a mixture of words and blood so eat my leaves in this mournful forest where my body torn away from itself hangs forever among the thorns of my own alien shade my home a hanging place where my many wounds breathe giving sermons in blood and the mutilations that have separated me from all my leaves gather them round the foot of this sad bush the snowflakes dancing alive in the grass with a fiver in my bloody hand transmission three received

At the end of 1980, when Hunter realizes who has betrayed him, he rushes off with a shotgun to look for his Judas, only to find that the cop has already blown his head off with his own shotgun in an abandoned building. Hunter sits down in despair. A few minutes later, two more men from the local police arrive.

Two figures in the doorway —
Two shotguns —
Two figures and two shotguns —
Alderman and Murphy —
Richard Alderman and John Murphy —
The shotgun across my knees —
The silent sixes, the shadows —
Wings, huge and rotting things —
Big, black raven things that —
That weigh me down, heavy and burnt —
That stop me standing —
That stop me —
Stop me —
— a shot

And so, on New Year’s Eve, 1980, the third book in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet ends. Yet another person who has navigated unspeakable violence in search of truth and justice has failed and fallen victim himself. One more book to go.

Oct 24

David Peace’s 1977: “What happened to our Jubilee?”

“In 1977, when the two sevens clash. . .”

In 1977, the second book of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, the focus shifts to the theme of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peace’s fictional substitute for Peter Sutcliffe, the real Yorkshire Ripper who was convicted in 1981 of murdering thirteen women. 1977 is narrated by two men who alternate chapters. One of the co-narrators is Jack Whitehead, a senior reporter for the Yorkshire Post, and a colleague of Edward Dunsford, who narrated the previous book. The other co-narrator is Bob Fraser, a cop with a conscience who was secretly aiding the now deceased Dunsford, who deliberately crashed his car on Christmas Eve, 1974. During 1977, women continue to be murdered and attacked. The police haul in a suspect, torture him, and finally let him go. He wasn’t the Yorkshire Ripper after all. But as 1977 progresses, Whitehead and Fraser unearth what they believe to be conclusive proof that several of the victims that the police have credited to the Yorkshire Ripper were in fact raped and murdered by local cops, who have also altered evidence and tampered with police files. Whitehead and Fraser make the mistake of bringing their case to higher police administrators, unaware that some of them are participants in the cover-up.

It is the year of the Royal Jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, but there seems to be no celebrating in Yorkshire. When this second part of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet comes to an end, one of the co-narrators will have just finished writing a suicide note to his son and the other will have quietly delivered himself to a man who will give him peace, but only at a brutal cost. Despite their best intentions and their collaborative attempt to bring about justice, both of their lives will have been ruined by corrupt police and powerful men, and neither wishes to exist any longer. 1977 continues the theme of sensitive main characters destroyed by the violent and misogynistic males that populate the Quartet. In this case we have Whitehead, who is continually remembering Carol, a woman who was mysteriously killed during some sort of ritual or exorcism that is not fully explained yet, and Fraser, a married man who is madly in love with a local prostitute. These two are up against policemen who routinely humiliate and torture those in their custody, and who use derogatory terms like “wogs” and “puffs” and worse when talking about blacks and gays.

Each of the twenty-five chapters of 1977 begins with a very brief excerpt from a fictional radio talk show conversation to give us a raw “voice of the people” insight into the fears, rumors, and concerns that circulated among Great Britain’s working class at that time. “The John Shark Show” that Peace has invented for Radio Leeds is said to be modeled on the real shock jock James Whales, even though Whales’ broadcasting days on Radio Leeds didn’t begin until 1982. In these “excerpts,” John Shark refers to each of his callers as “Bob.”

Caller: And now all sodding coppers are refusing to do overtime. Bloody criminals must be laughing up their sleeves.

John Shark: You don’t think the boys in blue deserve a pay raise then, Bob?

Caller: Pay-raise? Don’t make me bloody laugh, John. I wouldn’t pay them bastards a fucking penny until they bloody caught someone. And someone who’d bloody done something and all.

John Shark: Arrested Arthur Scargill again.

Caller: And that’s all they’re bloody good for, isn’t it? Nicking Arthur and grassing each other up.

The John Shark Show
Radio Leeds
Friday 17^th June 1977

(Arthur Scargill was a British leftist who led several coal miner’s strikes in the 1960s and 70s before becoming President of the National Union of Mineworkers. He was a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her policies.)

Each volume of the Quartet is generally written with great economy. There are moments when it feels as if Peace is writing a telegram and being charged by the word. “Glass smashing, brakes slamming, a red car careering down the road, zig-zagging, its windscreen gone, hitting one kerb, flipping over at the foot of a lamppost.” Or there is this scene in 1977, when Jack Whitehead re-reads his own published account of the pub shoot-out that led to the suicide by car accident of his colleague Edward Dunsford at the end of 1974. It’s the moment when he will glance at a newspaper photograph and realize that the “hero cops” were, in reality, dirty cops:

I looked at my watch:
Just gone six.
Slight change of plan.
Down the hall and back into records.
Back into 1974.
I spun the microfilm again, through the reels and over the lights.
Into Tuesday 24 December 1974.
Evening Post, Front Page:
3 DEAD IN WAKEFIELD XMAS SHOOT-OUT
Sub-headed:
Hero Cops Foil Pub Robbery
A photograph—

But at other times, Peace can write a multi-page run-on sentence that is reminiscent of the mystical poetry of William Blake, as we will see shortly.

As 1977 closes, Fraser goes mad after being framed by his own police colleagues for the murder of his girlfriend (whom they raped and brutally murdered). They then convince him that he is not the real father of his son. When we last see Fraser, he is preparing to commit suicide and is writing a farewell note to his son.

Meanwhile, Whitehead is also slowly going out of his mind, thinking of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper in 1888, and then the women either assaulted by or murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s. “I felt the tide coming in, the Bloody Tide, lapping at my shoes and socks, crawling up my legs,“ he thinks. “What happened to our Jubilee?” Whitehead is struggling with demons from his own past, and we finally learn that he witnessed the death of a woman named Carol, when the Reverend Laws drove a long nail into her head, apparently in an exorcism that went awry. Unable to escape the endless nightmarish images that are haunting him, he is drawn back to Reverend Laws—to the fateful room 77—and, at the end of a long, feverish sentence, he willingly submits to Laws, who has promised he can make the nightmares go away.

Here is the end of the nearly four-page sentence of Jack Whitehead’s thoughts that end 1977:

. . . futures written as pasts, people left behind in private, sovereign angsts, right royal hells, telling lies and telling truths so full of holes, these people so full of holes, all these heads so full of holes, the time at hand, outside the dogs and sorcerers, the whoremongers and murderers crouched in Southern cemeteries raining down blows to the heads of Scottish slags with blunt household instruments, in 1977 suffering your terrors, in 1977 I am desperate, in 1977 my companions are in darkness, in 1977 when young men see visions and old men dream dreams, dreams of remission and forgiveness, an end to penance, in 1977 when the two sevens clash and the cuts won’t stop bleeding, the bruises not healing, the two witnesses—their testimony finished, their bodies lying naked in the streets of the city, the sea blood, the waters wormwood women drunken with the blood and the patience and faith of the saints, and I stand at the door and knock, the keys to death and hell and the mystery of the woman, knowing this is why people die, this is why people, in 1977 this is why I see—

He brought the hammer down

—No future.

We learn in a later book that the Reverend Laws has pounded a long nail straight down into the top of Whitehead’s skull. Whitehead survives, but only to live in a mental institution, capable of uttering nothing more than gibberish.

The Red Riding Quartet offers no exit. Heroism fails. Mysticism fails. Crime fails. The press fails. Even being on the side of the law fails. Two more volumes to go.

Oct 16

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David Peace’s 1974: “Revenge and money, the perfect combination.”

“Power’s like glue. It sticks men like us together, keeps everything in place.”

Ominously, it’s Friday the 13th of December when the novel 1974 opens, the first of the 1,417 pages that comprise David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet. In this month the IRA will bomb Harrods department store in London and nearly manage to kill Prime Minister Edward Heath with a bomb at his home. But now, on page one, we, along with our narrator Edward Dunsford, pup reporter for the Yorkshire Post, find ourselves in a Leeds police station for a press conference about a ten-year-old girl named Clare Kemplay, who has gone missing. The article that Dunsford will write after this press conference and just minutes before attending his own father’s funeral, becomes his first by-line in the paper— “the Byline Boy at last.” This innocent beginning will send him spiraling into a hellscape of violence and corruption from which he will not be able to escape.

Eventually, young Clare’s dead body will be found in a ditch, having been brutally raped and tortured. But before that, Dunsford begins to wonder if Clare’s disappearance might be related to the disappearance of two other girls several years earlier who have never been found. As Dunsford gropes his way haltingly forward through interviews, digging through files, and running down tips, Peace has us groping our way across the page. Who is speaking? Where are we? What just happened? His sparse, staccato writing omits much context and is heavily weighted toward dialogue. This book, like the others in the series, often reads like a transcript of covertly recorded conversations, with just enough stage directions to keep us barely oriented. Our reward is that of the persistent researcher’s occasional aha moment. Our reward is the scrap of urban poetry scrawled on a telephone booth or snarled by a cop. Our reward is to come face to face with evil and be the only ones to come out unscathed at the end of four ominous books.

The plot that Peace sets in motion in 1974 has multiple threads. A few that are only hinted at in this book will be elaborated on throughout the three succeeding books. Some will be left as puzzles that won’t be solved until the very end of the fourth book. Several minor characters here will become primary characters as the series progresses. But Edward Dunsford’s fate is resolved at the end of this book. He begins as a naïve, overly cocky young journalist, determined to pursue the story of the missing young girl. Instead, he uncovers a criminal conspiracy that involves several important local businessmen, dignitaries, and policemen. He discovers who has raped and murdered several local children. Along the way, he will briefly think there is a book to be written about another unrelated murder by a man nicknamed the Ratcatcher. If the story turns out to be good enough, “maybe a quick paperback.” But en route to figuring all of this out, Dunsford’s investigation leads him to uncover outrageous police behavior—daily brutality on the beat, terrorizing of witnesses, forced confessions, racism, and outright police violence on innocent people. One night, tipped off, Dunsford observes the local Detective Chief Superintendent of Police and several of his aides watching and laughing as his men surround a rural gypsy camp, set it on fire, and beat with their truncheons anyone trying to leave the camp. They finally trundle some of the men from the camp into their police vans and strip the women of their clothes, which they throw into the fire as their children look on. Before leaving, they shoot up anything of value with their shotguns. The West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police call it “putting in a spot of overtime.”

Disgusted by the corruption within the local police department and government, and sickened by the way in which Clare Kemplay died, Dunsford eventually abandons his journalistic cover and turns crusader with a savior complex, determined to get to the bottom of things, regardless of the consequences. After the police arrest an innocent man for Clare’s murder, Dunsford’s rage for answers becomes a rage for revenge, and he turns into the “Fuhrer of a bunker of my own design.”

The ending of 1974 is a wave of violence and death instigated partly by Dunsford himself. He gets a shotgun and heads off to carry out his own form of justice on the pedophile, but he finds the pedophile has already beaten viciously and is dying. He then heads off to another house hoping to enact justice, but once again finds he is too late. A couple named the Dawsons have been tied up and gassed to death by carbon monoxide in their own car in their garage.

At this point, young Edward Dunsford, the “Byline Boy,” has nothing left to lose. His original motivation for pursuing the truth was journalistic glory, headlines, front page articles, perhaps a book. But now he’s lost his girlfriend, who became pregnant, and won’t speak to him any longer after he suggested she get an abortion. He’s lost a fellow reporter who was working the same case with him, and then died in a mysterious automobile accident after warning him that “there are Death Squads out there.” Several witnesses that he has interviewed have been murdered. He has been severely beaten several times by the police, who, on one occasion, even faked his own execution. The cop “brought the gun down on my head,” and then yelled to him, “THIS IS THE NORTH. WE DO WHAT WE WANT!” So, Dunsford takes the shotgun and goes to the bar where he feels sure he will find the two brothers that he knows attacked the pedophile and killed the Dawsons and also a fortune teller named Mandy Wymer.

“I want to know why.”
“Ever the journalist. Take a wild bloody guess, Scoop.”
“Over a fucking shopping centre?”
“Yeah, over a fucking shopping centre.”
“What the fuck did Mandy Wymer have to do with a shopping centre?”
“You want me to spell it out?”
“Yeah, spell it out.”
“No architect, no shopping centre.”
“So she knew?”
He was laughing. “Fuck knows.”
I saw little dead girls and brand new shopping schemes, scalped dead women and the rain off your head.
I said, “You enjoyed it.”
“I told you from the start, we’d all get what we want.”
“Which was?”
“Revenge and money, the perfect combination.”
“I didn’t want revenge.”
“You wanted fame,” hissed Box. “It’s the same.”
There were tears running down my face, on to my lips.
“And Paula? What was that?”
Box took another big pull on his fat cigar. “Like I said, I’m no angel . . .”
I shot him in the chest.

In the end, Dunsford drives off on Christmas Eve at 90 mph, presumably to his own death, singing along to “The Little Drummer Boy” as it plays on his car radio.

Throughout 1974, Peace uses Dunsford’s increasing paranoia, his mental unraveling, and a quick intake of disparate bits of Dunsford’s immediate surroundings to create a kind of collaged poetry. Here are two examples.

Back down Spencer Place in a sprint, foot down into Leeds and onto Motorway One, hoping to fuck I never see him again:
Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Dark, theories racing:
The rain on the windscreen, the moon stolen.
Cut to the chase:
I knew a man who knew a man.
‘He could tie it all together . . .’
Angels as devils, devils as angels.
The bones of the thing.
ACT LIKE NOTHING’S WRONG.

Ninety miles an hour, spooked.
Foot down on Motorway One, exorcising the Ghosts of Wakefield Past and Present.
Into the rearview mirror, a green Rover hugging my tail. Me paranoid, making it for unmarked police car.
Eyes high into the sky, driving inside the fat belly of a whale, the sky the colour of its grey flesh, stark black trees its mighty bones, a damp prison.
Into the mirror, the Rover gaining.
Taking the Leeds exit at the charred remains of the gypsy camp, the black frames of the burnt-out caravans, more bones, standing in some pagan circle to their dead.
Into the mirror, the green Rover heading North.
Underneath the station arches, parking the Viva, two black crows eating from black bin-bags, ripping through the wasted meat, their screams echoing into the dark in this, the Season of the Plague.

David Peace has taken us inside the fat belly of a very uncomfortable whale, a place where there is no exit but death. And there are three more volumes to go.

Oct 8

“No Future”: The Dystopian World of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

INTRODUCTION

“The lies, the greed, and the guilt.”

One of the most malevolent places I have ever experienced in the world of literature is the paranoid, claustrophobic corner of Britain depicted in the Red Riding Quartet, four books by David Peace published between 1999 and 2002 that are simply titled by the primary years that each book deals with: 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983. The Quartet is a series of four linked novels that uses aspects of the detective novel and the police procedural. Each volume has a different narrator or set of narrators. The main spine that runs through the 1,417 pages of these volumes is ostensibly the story of the police hunt for the so-called Yorkshire Ripper as it played out from 1969 to 1983, plunging the reader deep into a swath of northeast England haunted and frightened by the brutal murders of two dozen women, several additional attempted murders, and numerous rapes and assaults of women and girls. But the real story is one of police corruption, police brutality, and police cover-ups.

The miracle of the Red Riding Quartet is that David Peace keeps the reader in a state of disorientation and paranoia for over 1,400 pages and yet ever eager to read on. Peace’s writing in these four books is cinematic, and leans towards a clipped, poetic noir style. It’s full of flashbacks, quick jump cuts, and rapid-fire scene changes. Rather than one central crime to be solved, the Quartet is rife with crimes that aren’t immediately solved and questions that aren’t readily answered, sometimes until several books later. The page count may suggest a long-distance run, but this is reading as if running at a sprint. All of this makes the Quartet utterly compelling reading. I have read each volume multiple times and they get more interesting each time as I become wiser to Peace’s deft and meticulous plotting.

The central story of murder and brutality committed by the police is surrounded by incidents of satanic killing, incest, madness, suicide, brutal child abuse, and pornography, not to mention the string of murders and assaults by the Yorkshire Ripper. There are no heroes in the Quartet, simply a few people who become convulsed with good intentions and then pay a steep price for their decisions.

These are political novels in the truest sense. Although the action within the Quartet takes place within the limited geography of West Yorkshire, the reader is meant to see these books as a microcosm for the whole of Great Britain, perhaps of society at large at that time. The unending reign of greed and terror that bleeds across these pages is shown to be an outcome of a country paralyzed by poverty, austerity, unemployment, union busting, and deregulation—issues that only accelerate when Margaret Thatcher is elected Prime Minister in 1979, bringing the Conservative Party to 10 Downing Street. In 2004, Peace would turn more overtly to this subject with his stand-alone novel GB84, about the brutal coal miner’s strike that pitted unions against Margaret Thatcher and the British government. The Quartet covers basically the same time in Great Britain’s history as two of Derek Jarman’s similarly nihilistic films—Jubilee (1978), which depicts Queen Elizabeth II being killed in a mugging while punk anarchy reigns supreme on the streets of London, and The Last of England (1987), the film in which he took out all his anger on Thatcher’s homophobic, repressive England.

The principal characters that the reader will follow throughout the four volumes of the Quartet are members of the police forces from Manchester and West Yorkshire (based mainly in Leeds and Bradford), several reporters for the Yorkshire Post (based in Leeds), an attorney, a few petty criminals, and several local luminaries (businessmen, councilmen, and their wives). It’s a largely male world and an utterly chauvinistic one. The Quartet is evidence of what happens when testosterone goes unchecked.

Whenever Peace looks deeply into the heart of evil, he finds an obscene poetry, and, in a manner worthy of Baudelaire or Dostoevsky, he gives villainy and madness a variety of lyrical literary forms. Much of the Quartet is written in explosively compressed dialogue, which provides minimal clues to the reader as to who is speaking and, on occasion, what is being discussed. At times the dialogue reads like the transcript of tape-recorded conversations, at other times like sheer poetry.

Portions of the first three books of the Quartet are based loosely on the real-life case of Peter Sutcliffe, who was called the Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe was convicted in 1981 of murdering thirteen women, although police later felt sure he was responsible for several more deaths. He spent the rest of his life in prison, dying of COVID-related causes in 2020. A government investigation into the police handling of the real Yorkshire Ripper case found many deficiencies, but not the egregious (and presumably fictional) ones that Peace assigned to the police in his books, such as the torture of suspects, murder, and arson. The government’s Byford Report found that the local police operated “inefficiently,” delayed in pursuing vital tips, and had placed an officer in charge of the case based on seniority rather than ability.

Over several posts, I am going to traverse that terrible time and that bitter corner of England, book by book. Spoiler alert: I will be revealing all manner of things that Peace designed to be surprises within the Quartet. But I am convinced you will still want to read these brilliant books for yourself. 1974, the first book, is something of a prelude that deals with unrelated crimes, but will introduce us to the setting and numerous characters (mainly in the police force) who will play key roles in the succeeding volumes.

Sep 27

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Sebald Society & Robert Walser Society Announce Joint Program Oct 11-13, 2024

The annual meetings of the Robert Walser Society and the W.G. Sebald Society (Deutsche Sebald Gesellschaft) will be held jointly in Munich on October 11-13, 2024. The event will offer participants the opportunity to immerse themselves in the work of both authors and to explore points of contact and differences between the two. The conference will include discussions, readings, talks, lectures and a guided tour. Speakers include Thilo Krause, Esther Kinsky, Claudia Albes, Lucia Ruprecht, Anne Fuchs, Bernd Stiegler, Kay Wolfinger, and others.

The link to the full program is here.

Sep 9

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Enrique Vila-Matas, “Activist for Multiplicity”

“It goes without saying that I’m an activist for Multiplicity.“

The latest title to be translated into English by the eminent Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, Insistence as a Fine Art, is practically a miniature book, measuring about 4 by 2 3/4 inches and only 96 pages long. In January 2023, Vila-Matas gave a lecture at the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga called “La insistencia como una de las bellas artes.” He had been asked to select one work from the museum’s collection. The painting he selected was La Buenaventura (The Fortune Teller) from 1922, by the Spanish painter Julio Romero de Torres. It’s one of several paintings that the artist made on the same subject, and it’s one of a number of paintings in which the artist re-cycled some of the individual components from within the painting—the fortuneteller, the woman with the red shawl in the doorway, the Christ of the Lanterns, the backdrop of the city of Cordoba, etc. This led Vila-Matas to think about writers like himself, whose many books seem to be “a single book,” and artists like Cezanne, who painted Mont Saint-Victoire repeatedly. This struck him as a form of obstinacy and reminded him of a story about the writer John Banville. After Banville had given a reading from one of his books, a woman asked him when he was going to stop writing about men killing women. Banville “replied with Irish composure: ‘When I get it right, I’ll stop doing it’.”

Repetition? Therein lies, I thought straightaway, the nexus of connection I had been seeking between Romero de Torre’s painting and my own writing, in which repetition has always played an important role. Repetition viewed in a positive light.

Thinking about all of the versions of Romero de Torres’ The Fortune Teller, Vila-Matas sees that “their overall unity runs parallel with that of my literary work, since the latter is just one single book, composed of the various books I have written. . . I repeat myself in order to move forward. It wasn’t for nothing that I decided to join the Brotherhood of the Insistent. To project myself into the future, forever with the motto, ‘When I get it right, I’ll stop doing it’.”

At the end of his little book, Vila-Matas writes: “Romero de Torres painted halfway between the past and the future, halfway between classical art and the modern art that was to come, two arts that may have seemed irreconcilable except if, as Julio Romero did it, they were created lucidly in a fleeting present in which the two possible lives of painting were already beginning to intermingle.”

Vila-Matas is an adept and experienced writer on the visual arts. In 2012, he was one of several visiting writers at the mega-exhibition of contemporary art called Documenta, held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and he wrote a book about his experiences there called The Illogic of Kassel. Somewhat like Illogic, Insistence is written as a “personal diary,” as Vila-Matas both second-guesses his choice of painting and starts to home in on the approach he will take with his talk. In other words, it’s a book about his process. In Insistence, we watch over his shoulder as Vila-Matas makes decisions, rejects decisions, asks colleagues for advice, and does some research. The other aspect of multiplicity that Vila-Matas is suggesting to us is that there are many ways to talk about the painting by Romero de Torres, none of which are necessarily wrong or right—they are merely different.

Over the last eighteen years I have written about most of the books that Enrique Vila-Matas has had published in English. (You can check every post about him here.) As I wrote in 2013: “In the four books translated into English so far—Dublinesque, Never Any End to Paris, Montano’s Malady, and Bartleby & Co.—Vila-Matas explores the boundaries between life and literature and what happens when the two become confused with each other. In each of these books, Vila-Matas is also preoccupied with psychic paralysis in many forms, but most notably writer’s block and procrastination.” In Montano, his narrator had “literature sickness,” and I will confess that I struggled to appreciate those early novels when I first read them. I am more patient with them now. I’m a much more experienced reader and I have a clearer understanding of what Vila-Matas was trying to achieve—and that includes deliberately unsettling the reader’s expectations, even to the point of trying to irritate the reader. But somewhere between 2010 and 2014, when Dublinesque and Illogic were both written, the themes of writer’s block and literature sickness largely disappeared, and contemporary art seems to have opened new writing paths for him. After Illogic, he wrote Because She Never Asked (2015), which is about the artist Sophie Calle and the problem of discerning the difference between truth and fiction, which is a topic he picks up again in Mac’s Problem (2019).

Mac’s Problem was the last of Vila-Matas’ books that was translated into English. For unknown reasons, we still don’t have several of his books translated, including his most recent novel Montevideo, which was published in Spanish in 2022. I don’t understand why the books of an author of this stature aren’t translated immediately.

If you would like to see a very brief YouTube video excerpt (1 minutes 30 seconds long) of Vila-Matas giving his talk in Málaga, check it out here.

Enrique Vila-Matas, Insistence as a Fine Art. Hanuman Editions, 2024. Translated from Spanish by Kit Schluter.

Aug 19

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Mick Herron’s Mirror World

The stack of phone books holding up [Jackson Lamb’s] desk lamp testified to his analogue preferences. “You can break a man’s ribs with a telephone directory. Try doing that with a rolled-up copy of the internet.”

If you haven’t indulged in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series (eight books, so far) or the Slow Horses television series with Gary Oldman (two seasons, so far), do both immediately. I’ve only read two titles from the series, the opening book Slow Horses and the sixth title, Joe Country, which I chanced upon at my local library’s $2 sales shelf the other day. Both have become my go-to escape places of late. Briefly, for the uninitiated, the Slow Horses are those unlucky members of MI5 (Britain’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency), who, having screwed up at Regent’s Park in one way or another, have been relegated to Slough House, where they are not supposed to be able to do any further damage. And yet they do.

The well-respected British mystery writer Val McDermid is quoted on the front cover of my copy of Joe Country as saying that “Mick Herron is the John le Carré of his generation,” which says more about the generational change than anything that the two writers might have in common. Their primary similarity is that both write about spies. Yes, both are cynical, but I would argue in critically different ways. Herron’s books are much more violent than le Carré’s, and half the time the men and women of Slough House are fighting their own MI5 rather than the enemy, it seems.

Joe Country, or spy country, probably like all of the Slow Horses series, is mostly dialogue, much of which is maximally cynical or sarcastic. And that’s the aspect of Herron’s writing that I started thinking about.

Much of the appeal of the Slow Horses series is Jackson Lamb, the head of Slough House, the “grim overlord to the Service’s washouts.” Lamp is a flamboyantly lazy and slovenly character, whose dialogue amounts to wickedly sharp repartee full of obscenities and sarcasm. He relentlessly lambasts everyone in Slough House, denigrating their work, their appearance, their everything. Here’s the ever-sensitive Lamb in Joe Country, after giving an assignment to Roddy Ho, who is despondent because his girlfriend just walked out on him. “Wrap it up by teatime and I’ll see about getting you a gerbil, to replace that girlfriend of yours.”

And here he is meeting the latest assignee to Slough House, a young man whose laptop was recently found to contain child pornography (we later learn it was planted by a colleague at Regent’s Park):

—”Oh, goodie fucking gumdrops, [Lamb] said, when Lech stepped into his room. “Fresh meat.”
—”I was assigned here temporarily,” Lech said. “While some HR issues are sorted out.”
—”HR issues,” Lamb repeated slowly. “Not heard it called that before.” He removed his feet from the desk with surprising agility, produced a cigarette out of nowhere, lit it, farted, reached into a desk drawer, removed a bottle of whisky he slammed onto his desk top, farted again, and said, “I don’t have any bad habits myself, so maybe I’m over-censorious. But seriously, kiddy porn?” He unscrewed the cap on the bottle. “You’re the six-foot Pole I wouldn’t touch with that.”
—Lech Wicinski, who was five-eleven, felt his teeth clench. “I was told all details were sealed. You’re not supposed to know that.”
—”Yeah, a list of things I’m not supposed to know but do would be nearly as long as the list of things I know but couldn’t give a toss about. Currently, you’re at the top of both. And a thing you should know about me is, I hate lists.” He blew out smoke Lech hadn’t noticed him inhaling. “The ones I don’t screw up and throw away, I feed into the shredder.”
—Lech glanced around. The further reaches of the office were cloaked in shadow, but he couldn’t make out anything that might be a shredder.
—”Yeah, okay, smartarse. I improvise.” There was a dirty glass among the rubbish on his desk, and Lamb poured whisky into it; what might have been a triple, if your idea of a single was a double. “Says on the paperwork you go by Alec. But your signature reads Lech. I’m guessing you reckoned a little ethnicity wouldn’t do any harm at this stage of your career, eh? This stage being the bit right before it runs off the cliff.”
—”I answer to both.”
—”How very broad-minded of you. But then, we’ve already established your lack of boundaries.”
—”My lawyer–“
—”Your lawyer is a figment of your fucking imagination.”

Lamb never leaves the snark behind even when his own crew are putting their lives on the line, or even when one of them is killed in the line of duty. But it doesn’t take too long for the reader/viewer to see that Lamb is really an old Romantic at heart, he just can’t let people see him that way for some reason. His long-suffering assistant Catherine Standish is always trying to get Lamb to relent and say something nice, but he just can’t do it. But one day, when Standish is struggling with her own demons, trying desperately not to return to her alcoholic past, Lamb tells her a story about his past, about how Slough House came to be. A confession comes tumbling out. A terrifying revelation that made her think “the world had shifted, that the building was tumbling” down around her.

– Catherine stared at him in horror.
-[Lamb said,] “But me, I think it’s the law of unintended consequences. For other examples, see the history of the fucking world.”
-Lamb put the unlit cigarette in his mouth again.
-“They gave me Slough House once the shitstorm died down, and you know what they say. My gaff, my rules. And you know what rule one is. Nobody messes with my stuff. I don’t know what Frank Harkness is up to, and I don’t care. He left bodies in my yard, and he’ll pay for that.”

The kind of inverse love that Lamb shows for his slow horses makes sense in the world of Brexit and Trump, where the words that politicians and government officials speak seem to mean nothing (especially, Herron, writes, in Great Britain), where politicians speak of prosperity but vote for fiscal austerity and happily sell out to arms dealers and oligarchs. It makes even more sense when everyone at Regent’s Park, the head office of MI5, seems to be either ambitious, on the take, or such a toady that even the slightest fuck-up can’t be tolerated. It makes sense that those on the losing end, the individuals who have been relegated to Slough House, would show their love and dedication to each other in the only way that seems genuine to them, which is by being as cynical and sarcastic as possible to each other. And by standing by their colleagues when it counts. Even if it means dying for each other, which is what happens all too frequently in the Slow Horses series.

Jul 29

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Like a Sky Inside

“What we call growing up is a series of betrayals.”

In her new book Like a Sky Inside (Fern Books, 2024), the French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin heritage Jakuta Alikavazovic somehow managed to convince the mighty authorities of Paris’ Louvre Museum to let her stay overnight unattended among its unimaginably valuable collection. “At that time neither the security personnel nor the curator, nor even my editor . . . none of them knew that I am the daughter of a man who, each time we visited [the Louvre], he asked me: And you, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa? “

Hoping that the museum will not subject her to the usual security measures, Alikavazovic carried something illegal inside her bag on the night of August 7, 2020, something she never reveals to us. While partly an opportunity to observe and think deeply about art, much of Like a Sky Inside becomes a recapitulation of her relationship with her father, a Serb who fled Yugoslavia to come to the Paris that he had loved from afar. “He did everything in the Louvre. Even brush my teeth, he confided to me once, which struck me as insane and which I’m nevertheless going to do in a few hours.” He taught himself French in the Louvre by reading French novels and books about the artists in the Louvre.

Before the lights go out at midnight, she runs, twirls, slides in her socks, and comes face-to-face with a janitor mopping the floor, who only smiles and shrugs. She eats a nougat bar in clear defiance of the no-food rule. But then the lights go out at ten, instead of midnight, and the museum is plunged into shadows. “The history of art is a ghost story for grown-ups, my father used to say.”

As Jakuta grows up, she sees her father conducting business in the Louvre, without really thinking too much about it. One day her father leaves her on a bench in the museum while he goes to make a quick telephone call. By closing time he still hasn’t returned and a museum guard is speaking to her when her father finally comes running up, out of breath. Looking back on the many times when her father asked her how she might steal the Mona Lisa, she thinks: “it took me almost a quarter of a century to wonder what it really was that drove my father to ask me that exact question. Into what part of his life, his secret life, was he unknowingly—of perhaps knowingly—trying to initiate me.”

Eventually, Jakuta rejects everything about her father, including the Louvre, France, even French. She comes to America, dyes her hair pink, and likes the kind of artists her father doesn’t understand—James Turrell, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria. Fittingly, she uses a bus visit to Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah to spiral her way back to her father, back to sleeping one night in the Louvre twenty years later, finally aware that she was very much in his mold. “My secret is that I have come here tonight to become my father’s daughter again.”

One day someone hints that her father might have had something vaguely to do with the theft of five valuable paintings from Paris’ Museum of Modern Art on May 20, 2010. As she lies in a sleeping bag beneath the Venus de Milo, wide awake, she wonders if there could be any truth at all to this rumor. In the early morning hours of August 8, Jakuta wanders the museum alone, trying to decide where to leave the mysterious gift she has brought to honor her father. Near Diana the Huntress? Among the Corots? Among the Roman copies of Greek statues?

Why was he incapable, or why did he think me incapable, of visiting the Louvre without ulterior motives, as anyone would, as everyone does? What I think today, and it all but breaks my heart, is that this reverie betrayed a kind of sadness. An unspoken sadness. That this dream, seemingly light, testified to my father’s illegitimacy. The illegitimacy he felt, in spite of everything, finding himself here. As though his presence was improper. As though he was guilty merely by being here—and only he knew it.

One of the things that is so intriguing to me about Alikavazovic’s book is that its goal is to sneak something—well, actually several things—past the reader’s security. A book that is supposed to be about a sleepover at the world’s most famous museum ends up being about topics of much greater import: trying to understand how her Serbian father, who fled an ethnic-cleansing Yugoslavia, fell in love with a France where he never felt legitimate; trying to understand why art is protected behind bulletproof glass and with guards while human life is often tossed aside as worthless or mowed down relentlessly as it was in her father’s city of Sarajevo; debating if art has any value in today’s war-torn world. Like a Sky Inside is a very worthy read.

Translated from the 2021 French original by Daniel Levin Becker.