I recently watched the stunning 3-part movie series "Red Riding" twice because it was so powerful and complex. I found things I had completely missed in the first viewing. It was based on David Peace's book series so I picked them up to see if there was more to be had. Sure enough, the book enhanced the movie's understanding even further.So far I've read 1974 and 1977. 1977 is the basis for the second part of the Red Riding movie trilogy set in the north of England around the Leeds/Bradford area. It is a brutal and grisly story of perversion, brutality, and corruption among police there which suppress the truth about what is really behind a series of brutal murders of Prostitutes whiche attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper. Jack Whitehead a crime Reporter and Detective Bob Fraser who were minor characters in the first book, 1974 are both involved in affairs with prostitutes as well as the crime investigation. They are two tormented men who stumble unto a sadistic connection between the murders and members of the Yorkshire police.Peace's writing is fascinatingly raw and grisly. This book (or movie)is not for the faint of heart. He paints a grim picture of life in the north of England as the plot weaves back and forth while the murders continue to mount and Whitehead and Faser come up against what is really happening.The movie Red Riding Part 2-1977, was loosely based upon the book but diverged significantly in detail, plot and characters enough along the way to make both worth reading/watching and serve to enhance one another since the story is so complex. They are both superb works of crime noir which can be enjoyed on their own or combined as I did.
I'm a little disappointed in this book. Particularly as a 1,001 Books you must read before you die. Really? A bunch of scholars really thought I should read BOOK 2 in a series of 4, where the crime is not resolved at all? Huh? I think I would have enjoyed it on my own as the full quartet but I have to say the recommendation by Boxall's was very much off the mark. 1974 felt like it had closure and the crime felt solved. This book has a lot of corrupt cops, a lot of rape, a lot of adultery, a lot of prostitutes, a lot of descriptions of female body parts (particularly in describing pictures in a porno), and a lot of interior monologue masturbating. All of this would be fine if it had any substance and style. But it did not. It did not feel like a complete novel.I initially was excited to read a story from Fraser's point of view because in 1974 he was a little strange, emotionally detached, and I liked him. In this book, well, he is obsessed with his prostitute. Very seriously obsessed. In a very not interesting way. I also started liking Whitehead, but I lost interested in his character as he didn't grow or evolve after Part I.I kind of thought this book sucked. At least my edition had a picture of Sean Bean on the cover, which was nice on the eyes. However, I am a sucker and still have hope that the Quartet is going somewhere. I have ordered 1980 to see if it gets better. Friends, don't read this book unless I tell you 1980 is freaking amazing.
More unrelenting grimness - at its worst the way Peace revels in horrible things happening again and again seems a bit adolescent, even ridiculous. There's an awful lot of (often sexual) violence perpetrated against women in order to give the male protagonists motivation, which is cheap and tired.But, like 1974, this has got a real momentum which comes from the urgent prose style (lots of terse sentences, short paragraphs, repetition). When it gets going in the second half, it's as compelling as anything I've read recently. So, er, I strongly dislike quite a few things about this series, but am clearly going to read the remaining two books anyway...
—Nick
This is the second book in Peace' Red Riding Hood Quartet. It is just as grim and well-written as the first one. Although there are two narrators here, Jack Whitehead and Bobby Fraser, their voices are very similar (and like Nineteen Seventy-Four's Eddie Dunford), that I sometimes had trouble telling them apart. That was my only real problem with Peace's writing, however, as this book only seems to improve on the gory poetry of the first. The violence, corruption, and horror is almost mind numbing, and Peace's unique stream-of-consciousness ramblings, where the comma splices come like bullets and the obscenity pools like piles of blood, contributes to a sense of unreality, despite the realistic details of the setting. It's a nightmare that you can't wake up from, because if you put the book down, you will still be thinking about it, wondering what is truth and what is a dream. A brutal, beautifully styled noir, where there are no real answers (although I'm hoping we may get some by the end of the quartet), no heroes, and no rest for the wicked (the good don't exist). I will definitely be reading the rest of the series. It's like watching a train wreck, where you can't look away, and some perverted part of you doesn't want to.
—Marcia
Club Read Like four-hour root-canal therapy reading this 341-page riff on sexual violence and police corruption. Since serial murders of prostitutes has become something of a crime fiction sub-genre, I didn't give much thought initially to how Peace might extrapolate upon the real-world events of the Yorkshire murders as a basis for his story. Would it be a police procedural, hard-boiled crime fiction, 'true crime', a study in criminal psychology or something horrific like Silence of the Lambs?
—FrankH
