There comes a point in David Peace’s new novel Occupied City when you realise that you will never be able to mention the book without using the words repetition and staccato. These are the favourite words used to describe Peace’s writing and he does indeed go to town with his distinctive style in his latest.
Occupied City is the second part of David Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy. Set in 1948 during the third year of the US occupation, the novel begins with a man walking into a city bank and claiming to be a doctor. Sixteen employees are given a medicine that the man insists will protect them against dysentry. They are poisoned, with twelve of them dying and the murderer escaping. Peace explores his familiar themes of cover up and false accusations, with twelve distinct chapters exploring the Teikoku Bank Massacre where a man was (possibly wrongly) convicted of the crime.
Similar to his Red Riding quartet, Peace weaves his highly individual prose with real life events, and like the earlier novels this is challenging work. Perhaps even more so, and it is hard to imagine him finding many new supporters with this book. It is his least accessible of novels, at times almost completely inpenetrable. Occupied City does brilliantly evoke the atmosphere of how post-war Tokyo lived and breathed and Peace, as ever, proves himself a highly individual voice. But at times I couldn’t help thinking that he is beginning to alienate himself from his audience. Literature really shouldn’t be this hard.
She still had the same eyes, bright and shrewd, and she still laughed with her mouth tightly shut, as if holding in some secret. In many ways she was far more attractive than her twenty-two year old self. She was no longer cutting her own hair for one thing, and she had lost some of that library pallor, that shoe-gazing petulance and surliness. How would he feel, he wondered, if he were seeing that face for the first time now? If he had been allocated table twenty-four, had sat down and introduced himself. Of all the people here today, he thought, he would only want to talk to her. He picked up his drink and pushed back his chair.
David Nicholls’ One Day is a book that’s currently causing a summer buzz, where satisfied readers are already asking eachother who will play Dex and Em in the inevitable film version (fellows readers being very easy to hook up with thanks to the magic of Twitter).
The stir this novel is causing is well deserved; it’s one of the best British novels I’ve read for years. Certainly there with Jonathan Coe and Nick Hornby on top form, and a book I was expecting to be a lightweight read has proved to be one of extraordinary depth and quality.
Dexter and Emma meet as students on St Swithin’s day in 1988. One Day revisits them on each subsequent July 15th over the next 20 years. Dex is an arrogant and frankly obnoxious young man whose ego is given an unjustified boost when he becomes a minor tv celebrity as the host of Largin’ It, a programme that makes The Word look like Newsnight. Dex is the shallow and self-centred guy we’ve all met, hated, endured or avoided. Emma is a sensible romantic girl (although at times equally shallow) who becomes a teacher and eventually a successful author. They never quite hit it off in 1988, but slowly become best friends. Dex pursues the road of drink, drugs and women, while Em embarks on a couple of doomed relationship. We meet them every year, as time flashes by with alarming regularity. They mature, things happen and their lives are shook up. We warm to them.
David Nicholls doesn’t explore social history too much, and in many ways this is the strength of the book. Dex’s musical taste gives a flavour of the years as they pass, and his lifestyle reflects something of the 1990s but we don’t become too bogged down in the era. For anyone born after the mid 60s One Day will prove particularly resonant with its sketches of student life in the late 80s and laddism of the 90s (which was particularly vivid for me in all of its ugliness), but Nicholls excels as a writer in tackling more universal subjects. I found the sequence where Dexter struggles with fatherhood particularly convincing, and equally his awkward relationship with his family.
What’s best is how One Day gradually evolves from an apparently undemanding read into something rather wonderful. It is similar in many ways to Nicholls’ earlier Starter for Ten, although he has noticeably matured as a writer since then. I don’t want to give away too much about the ending, but this is a book dealing with similar themes to The Time Traveller’s Wife that proved to be infinitely superior and far, far more moving. Nicholls finds a way to effortlessly move between the years, most effectively towards the end when we are allowed one last and poignant peek at 1989. And the significance of July 15th becomes all too sadly clear.
I cannot recommend this novel more. And if you find Dex particularly loathsome that’s just par for the course; be warned that by the end you won’t want to forget him.
‘Well then…’ He coughs and plants one foot inside the car as if to go. Then he glances at the towering house, the turrets, and the gargoyles that seem to hold the bricks together around the crenellations. ‘Great place’, he says. ‘Fascinating.’ He pauses. I think I see him shiver.
I’m creating a new genre of fiction and I’m calling it psychological decaying mansion. Two excellent recent novels that fit into this category are The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Usually set in the later half of the last century, these novels observe events in once grand and prosperous homes, now reduced to dark, shuttered rooms and ghosts, oh so many ghosts. The latest in this genre is The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams, a first novel that was nominated for last year’s Costa prize.
This time the crumbling family home is occupied by a reclusive elderly lady called Ginny, a former expert in the field of lepidoptera. After forty seven years away, her sister Vivien suddenly returns. Ginny begins to dip into the memories of their childhood, growing up with their eccentric and moth-obsessed father and their alcoholic and raving mother.
Ginny proves a worthy addition to the school of the unreliable narrator, and Adams is extremely skilful at only hinting at the terrible insanity deep within her. And she also shows the potential of a novelist eager to play with their reader. There are times when it is unclear where the narrative is going, what exactly has happened in the tangled past and what Ginny is really capable of. And you will learn an awful lot about moths from this novel.
Although The Behaviour of Moths took for me a very long time to get going, the novel became extremely gripping as I became immersed in the development of this most odd of families. Unfortunately the conclusion is far from satisfactory. The reasons for Vivien’s return are never properly explained, and there isn’t nearly enough interaction between the two sisters when they reunite in old age. And whilst many threads of the book are deliberately left open ended Adams doesn’t succeed in making them fascinating enough. But still a worthy read, and still an author to watch out for.
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