David Peace: Tokyo Year Zero

Occupied City by David Peace
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In my review of this books predecessor (Tokyo Year Zero, I had a little rant about how much I admired Peace's ability to make crime (and its victims) matter. This book picks up on that theme early, with "The First Candle", written in the collective voice of victims of a mass killing:

"Do we matter to you? Did we ever matter?
Our mouths always screams,
already screams, screams
that mouth:
Your apathy is out disease; your apathy, a plague..." (p.6)

Notice a bit of repetition there? Just a smidge? Well hang on to your hats, people, because there is a lot more where that came from. Peace is not the first to use the technique, and while others have complained (and even satirised)it, until now I have always felt he uses it to good effect. With this one, though, I was cursing the geek who had ever invented the "cut and paste" function.  When I should have been hanging on every word while my head pounded with the rhythm, my eyes were skimming over paragraphs I had read one, two or three times before, thinking "Okay, Dave, okay. I get the point, already."

The book opens with a writer fleeing with an "unfinished book of unsolved crime" and the collective dead telling him that "we are here (...) because of you, our dear sweet, sweet writer dear, because of you..." (p.4). The theme of story telling, truth and lies runs through the book (and lends it a structure), suggesting Peace continues to grapple with the morality and motive of mining the annals of "true crime" for his work.

While these reflections should, in theory, enrich the novel in this case it didn't do it for me. I ended up feeling it was a valiant but ultimately unsatisfying attempt at a very ambitious project.

I can't help thinking that if Peace has come to the conclusion that in bringing the victims back to life the writer is "their wound", "their plague",(p.287) then perhaps the author's own ambivalence about the task is this book's biggest enemy.

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