These two novels are set more than a century and many thousands of miles apart, though they both tell a story of relentless inevitability and painfully intense locality. They both have the desperate sexual weakness of men at their heart, and both are fuelled by the unravelling of flimsy narratives to account for that weakness. McCarthy gives us a travelogue, covering what seems to be only a few square miles of blasted yet fecund and revoltingly natural terrain, across which a woman travels searching for the son her brother fathered and gave to an itinerant. Stunted relationships with remote and fearful communities wither after a few pages each, as she ploughs on.
David Peace has written a war-story of a novel set in the heart of a police investigation into a series of brutal and lurid sexual murders in the North of England, jubilee year. It hasn't quite the shocking effect of "1974", and the dreadfully sticky, greasy, bluntly functional familiar details of relations between the English genders are not quite so garishly lit; I'm sure all the fuel and flesh missing from the TV adaptation is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment