Product Description

The intertwining storylines see the "Red Riding Quartet's" central themes of corruption and the perversion of justice come to a head as BJ the rent boy, lawyer Big John Piggott, and cop Maurice Oldfield, find themselves on a collision course that can only end in terrible vengeance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #214442 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
Nineteen Eighty Three is the final volume of David Peace's titanic Red Riding Quartet, which portrays crime and police brutality in Yorkshire in graphic detail. Using actual events to ground the narrative in reality, Peace hops back and forth through the seventies and early eighties, moving between three main stories. A young girl disappears, just as another child disappeared a decade before, which raises questions about the original police investigation. A solicitor struggles to uncover the truth, fighting against endemic corruption and silence, while a senior policeman suffers pangs of conscience. Meanwhile, the desire for vengeance is building in a traumatised victim of abuse. The tension is sustained right to the end, as the full implications of their shared experiences become apparent. Often described as the British James Ellroy, Peace has written a brilliant, searing novel, whose splintered and allusive style builds up layers of meaning to shattering effect. (Kirkus UK)

Buzz
‘Nineteen Eighty Three is a fitting conclusion for one of the finest series in contemporary Biritsh crime writing’

Daily Telegraph
... a triumph of sustained narrative energy that reinvigorates the British crime novel with stylistic élan and a universal relevance’

Customer Reviews

Heart of darkness
FOr anyone with even a passing interest in crime fiction, David Peace's Red Riding quartet is essential reading. Set in Yorkshire throughout the seventies and eighties, Peace balances the case of the Yorkshire Ripper with the theme of police corruption. Not cheerful stuff then, but fantastically crafted and well observed.

All four books are violent and disturbing outings. Peace's characters are cruel, selfish and self-loathing creations that stay with the reader long after the book is finished.

1983 is the final part of the quartet and should only be read after completing the first three. This isn't the type of series you can miss bits out of.

As usual the plot is tense and draws the reader in. The kind of book that takes one long sitting, it is very hard to put down. Indeed, due to the breakneck pace of Peace's startling prose, it is often impossible to withdraw from the narrative at all.

This novel is the strongest of the four, utillising a tight yet intricate structure, thrusting the reader back and forth across the decades revealing startling truths about the characters, many of whom are familiar from earlier in the series.

Indeed, many of the images used here are also familiar from earlier giving the reader a sense of a claustrophobic communal nightmare.

If you've never read any David Peace, I suggest starting with the superb 1974 and working your way through. If you've already read the first three books, you need to read this. But then you know that already.

A stunning conclusion to the Quartet
When a figure dominates a genre as James Ellroy does modern crime fiction, then it is inevitable that blurb writers suggest unnatural comparisons between authors and the master. Many have suffered. Ian Rankin is Scotland's Ellroy; and David Peace is Yorkshire's. While some writers suffer from the comparison, Peace does not.

His series of novels set in and around Leeds at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders is in my view the finest modern British series in crime fiction. Dark, desperate, highly stylised, moving, they engage with modern Britain - drawing on a number of topical themes: abuse; corruption; conspiracy.

This the final novel in the quartet revisits many of the threads initiated in 1974, but are presented in such a way that knowledge of the previous novels is not necessary.

The three principals here: BJ, a rent boy, Piggot, a corrupt solicitor, and Jobson, a corrupt policeman, are set in three different interlinking narratives. In demonstrating how his style has developed since his earlier work, here various devices are used effortlessly. Piggot's chapters are written in the second person, BJ refers to himself continually in the third person. The device differentiates the narrative threads, but also serves to demonstrate the distancing each character has from their story.

The characters are all too human, complex people with complex motivations. Violence is presented explictly, the consequences of actions explored (throughout the whole of the twenty five year span covered by the novel).

The subject matter - violent child murders and abuse - may be too much for some. The writing style may be too much for others. BUt make no mistake, David Peace is the most exciting and most important thing that has happened to crime fiction in the UK in a very long time.

A fitting conclusion to a stunning series
The "Red Riding" quartet shudders to a shocking climax in this raw,disturbing novel. Peace's style becomes more staccato with every volume;paragraphs become sentences; sentences become words; words become curses,and the physical and mental degradation and damage his protagonists gothrough becomes ever more disturbing. In David Peace's books, there'svery little difference between cops and victims, lawyers and criminals -everyone lives in a world of fear, pain, terror. Anyone can die at anymoment - or worse, they can remain alive to deal with the physical andmental scars.Nineteen Eighty-Three is again dominated by the corrupt, horrificpsychological landscape of West Yorkshire, the hearts of its people asbleak and empty as the moors above the hellish towns. This time we'vealso got the backdrop of an ever-more evil government, an ever-morecorrupt system - in the clash between bent cop Jobson and bent lawyerPigott that forms the backbone of this story and closes the series it'shard to tell which man is more damaged, more amoral. Peace's universe iscomplex and frightening.Is Leeds the hero or villain of this series? Who knows. Peace's Leeds isevery bit as grimly delineated as Chandler's or Ellroy's LA, Rankin'sEdinburgh, or Hiaasen's Florida.Not an easy read, but a compelling and thrilling one.