David Peace

I’d never heard of the British neo-noir author David Peace prior to this Harper’s essay by Evelyn Toynton, but he sounds like an interesting stylist. Here’s a taste of his prose, quoted in the article:

I was thinking of her, thinking of her, thinking of her, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her hair, thinking of her ears, thinking of her eyes, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her lips, thinking of her teeth, thinking of her tongue, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her neck, thinking of her collarbone, thinking of her shoulders, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her breasts, thinking of the skin, thinking of her nipples, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her stomach, thinking of her belly, thinking of her womb, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her thighs, thinking of the skin, thinking of the hair, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her piss, thinking of her shit . . . praying Carol stayed gone . . .

And if you don’t like that, not to worry. As Toynton notes, Peace loves to fracture his books into multiple narrative voices.

Here’s a bit from Toynton on Peace’s novel GB84:

Like the novels of Larsson, who was a crusading left-wing journalist, Peace’s books are fueled by political passion—specifically, a ferocious rage at the culture of greed and ruthlessness that destroyed any sense of community. If the Red Riding Quartet depicted police complicity with rapacious capitalists, his next novel was a full-scale indictment of British society. The central subject of GB84 was what Terry Eagleton, in his admiring review of the book, called “the last epic battle of the British class struggle”—the bloody and disastrous miners’ strike of that year, when Margaret Thatcher in effect broke the unions once and for all, with the help of what Peace depicts as a calculated P.R. campaign to demonize the strikers and manipulate the general public.

The book also represented a technical advance for Peace, not so much a departure from the Red Riding Quartet as a logical development from it. Rather than offering a single narrative, the story of the strike is told from many juxtaposed perspectives—that of an embattled union leader, of a politician referred to only as “the Jew,” of some neo-Nazis, of some scabs, of some crooked cops. The sentences, again, are mostly very terse and lean, stripped of dependent clauses and even of verbs; there are, again, many one-sentence paragraphs; yet there is also more incantatory repetition than ever. Finally, each chapter—there are fifty-three, one for each week the strike lasted—contains a stream-of-consciousness passage expressing the rage and anguish of the picketing miners, which sometimes transcends the merely personal to become quasi-mystical, if a bit portentous

Peace’s latest book is Occupied City, the middle volume in a trilogy about Japan after World War II.

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