What a disgusting, contemptible, morally repulsive book.

The main character is a garbage human being. He moons over pictures of perfect little school girls a bit too much. His opinions of grown women are disgusting and weak. He ditches his girlfriend when he impregnates her. She's forced to have an abortion without support from him. It's barely believable that he has any sort of relationship with any woman. He uses the word “fuck” until it becomes little more than an irritant rather than a word of emphasis. I found myself wishing for his demise, so he could just die already and be over with the thing.

Ed is an unreliable narrator in a profession that relies on reliability. Told from his POV, the narrative can go from snooze-worthy tedium to WTF! in less than a paragraph. This is a person who needs psychiatric meds. Now.

The horror of the book is that all the characters are drowning in shit and piss. They revel in the basest of needs and wants. They are corrupt and self-serving to the point of absurdity. And their helpless victims are butchered because of it.

Let's not say that it is a product of an era. Not on the day after the LISK was finally arrested. Because women and girls are still dying while law enforcement diddles with egos out, treat women with contempt, and upper-class people pearl-clutch about names without actually doing anything for women in danger. Nothing ever changes. Not really.

I did not love the experience of this book, but that doesn't mean that the book is bad.

However, it's an unpleasant book that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. ( )

Quite the perfect Christmas read, Peace’s filthy goddamn Yorkshire horror story is fucking fantastic. It’s a real accomplishment when you can return from the adapted material, Channel 4’s excellent three-part series of TV films, to the source material and get a serious kick out of it without going ‘Oh I know where this is all going, so what’s the bloody point?’

Peace’s prose is crystal clear, grimy, yet absolutely ideal for the yarn he spins here - a journalistic style primed to adequately elucidate the plight of his protagonist. You crack open a page of Nineteen Seventeen Four and bile practically seeps out of the page, coagulated blood makes the book so sickly and sticky you can barely pry the thing open. It’s pitch perfect nausea, absolutely unrelenting. I mean this thing is pegged as Yorkshire noir, but calling it noir isn’t a sufficient enough term for the blackness found here.

Nineteen Seventeen Four swings like a pendulum between God and his angels and the abject horror of a dead young girl’s leering smile as it emerges from black and white school photos, and the momentum of this thematic swing, this contradiction between the graceful and omnibenevolent movement of a swan to the utterly pitch black corruption of all and sundry creates a giddy sickness and delirium within the (un)fortunate reader. Dreams bubble forth into the narrative, collapsing frameworks of reference, an endless vista of grey nothingness illuminating the entire tragedy.

Mark Fisher’s characterisation of the novels (I’m only at the first so fingers crossed Peace’s own writerly momentum carries through, both thematically and when it comes to being bloody interesting) as Manichaean/Gnostic is spot on. His chapter dedicated to it in Ghosts of my Life is certainly worth a flick through for those interested.

But yeah, fan-fucking-tastic. I devoured this sucker (like our good ol’ character BJ) and will quickly get through the rest. As I bothered doing a review I’ll give the same old music recs to play alongside, even though the book has a sickly discography of its own consisting of Elton John and Bryan Ferry and all that lot if you’re a die hard when it comes to getting the actual diegetic atmosphere.

- Penderecki, Sacred Choral Works
- Branca, World Turned Upside Down
- Branca, Symphony No.5
- Porter Ricks, Porter Ricks
- Akira Rabelais, Spellewauerynsherde ( )

1974, West Yorkshire, se acerca la Navidad. Eddie Dunford, corresponsal de sucesos del Evening Post, empieza a tener firma en la cabecera del periódico. La desaparición de una niña de diez años –cuyo cadáver aparece en un solar en construcción, con unas alas de cisne cosidas a la espalda– es su primer gran reto profesional. El periodista recuerda antiguos casos sin resolver de niñas desaparecidas y encuentra un vínculo entre los crímenes. Turbios manejos inmobiliarios, concejales sobornados y policías corruptos se interpondrán en su investigación…

Mörk, tungt och blött. Rapp och skitig dialog och ingen försköning alls av hur David Peace verklighet i Yorkshire 1974 ser ut. Det går undan i handlingen och man måste som läsare vara på tårna hela tiden. Jag gillar verkligen detta, får flera gånger James Ellroy vibbar, men förstår om det inte passar alla. Hade inte tänkt sträckläsa kvartetten men nu hugger jag in på nästa bok direkt. ( )

Having recently re-watched the TV adaptations I decided to re-read the books and I'd forgotten how much was different in this one. The merging of John Dawson with another character and not even meeting Dawson (so to speak) until the very end, the different locations and added layers to the corruption. Makes me wonder what else I've forgotten from the others. ( )