May Peace be With you

After my recent entry regarding the Damned United and the brouhaha (what a word) made about the TV programs, I decided to treat myself to the first in David Peace's Red Riding quartet 1974. Just as my A levels are approaching I have become addicted to yet another series of ulterior sources that have no input to my syllabus. Brilliant.

Narrated in the same gritty stream as The Damned... and punctuated by more fucks that a prostitutes work day, 1974 is a hard, cold bastard of a book. Grisly, unflinching and intelligent it evokes a place and time like nothing I have ever read and, just as The Wire perfectly depicts Baltimore, it captures Leeds and Yorkshire in all its morose, nicotine stained glory. Protaganist Eddie is a conflicted, bitter crime reporter back from a stint on Fleet Street and trying to drag himself out of the shadow of provincal legend Jack Whitehead. He is beautifully drawn, desperate for validation and inflicted with a venomous self loathing for the means he will use in order to gain it. As the plot weaves the main story line of missing children together with local political intrigue and corrupt coppers there is a seeming constant foreboding foreshadowing of the dire events which are seem set to come. Dire events which I haven't reached yet but I will by tommorow hopefully ( I read over half of the book in an hour and a half earlier such was it's addictiveness).

I wish that I had read them in time to catch the big budget channel four adaptations from last week. I'll get round to them at some stage and have been reliably informed they are out on DVD on the 13th of April. I'm definatley going to fail my A Levels...