David Peace's Dark Materials

In 2007 David Peace was voted Writer of the Year by GQ magazine. This accolade brought him the same level of exposure that the magazine had previously given to James Ellroy who, as Katy Shaw points out, has exerted a significant influence upon Peace's work. In addition to the stylistics and obsessive literary archaeology that appear to link pieces like Ellroy's White Jazz (1992) with Peace's 1974 (1999), both authors have also developed their careers within a matrix of writing, media attention, and adaptation. Just as Ellroy became a dominant cultural reference point in 1997 thanks to Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential, so too was 2009 dubbed 'the year of Peace' by Faber owing to its publication of Occupied City (2009) and the release of two major film projects, The Red Riding Trilogy (2009) and The Damned United (2009). In the light of this exposure, Shaw's single-author study comes as a welcome consolidation of the wide range of Peace interviews, reviews, and profiles. It productively and necessarily raises the interpretative bar, transferring Peace's work fromthe 'best of ' list to the sphere of scholarly attention.

Conducted over the course of seven tight chapters, Shaw's investigation chronologically covers all of Peace's work to date. Starting with his Red Riding Quartet, 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983 (1999-2002), an exhaustive study of the Yorkshire Ripper case and its surrounding contexts, we move to his novel of the miners' strike, GB84 (2004). From here Shaw considers The Dammed United (2007) before finishing the main analysis with a consideration of Tokyo Year Zero (2008) and Occupied City (2009), the first two novels of Peace's projected Tokyo Trilogy. This discussion as a whole is bookended by a useful introduction and a brief but insightful coda, 'His Dark Materials', that considers the key points of the book in relation to the current success of Peace's projects outside the confines of the novel.

What is clear from this outline is that Peace is not only a very successful novelist, but also a prolific one. Eight novels in ten years. The intended publication of Tokyo Regained in 2011 will complete a trilogy to stand alongside his quartet, and Shaw tells us that GB84 is to be connected to a further two novels to construct a second trilogy. The production of this amount of critically acclaimed work clearly invites serious attention, but at the same time its volume is potentially problematic for a project that seeks to offer a short, critical, and interpretative introduction. While it is important for both author and critic that ground is broken, introductory studies often position themselves uneasily between breadth and depth. The desire to be comprehensive can sometimes come at the cost of analysis, causing subsequent texts to fill the gaps rather than advance the debate.

Initially it seems as if Shaw's book, as the 'first secondary resource concerning this rising star of contemporary British literature', falls victim to some of these problems. The Red Riding Quartet dominates the book, occupying four chapters. GB84 and The Damned United get one each, while the two Tokyo novels are discussed together in chapter 7.'Ostensibly this is a sensible, quantitative division of the novels across the book. However, the Red Riding novels are considered as a quartet throughout chapters 1 to 4, and in each instance they are also framed in relation to a range of different ideas. For example, chapter 2 suggests that the quartet 'mobilizes socio-ideological discourses of gender, religion and temporality to interrogate heteroglossic exchanges as a key site of contemporary social, political and cultural conflict'. Here, a constellation of complex texts is positioned in relation to an equally complex network of themes. When attempting to execute analysis of this depth within the confines of her particular project, Shaw's interpretative force is sometimes dissipated across sentences that rely more on explication than interpretation. Later in chapter 2, when discussing how 'the Ripper murders evidence a desire for re-enactment', we...