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Enter `The Red Room' with care

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Nov 04, 2001, Page 18

Why do thriller writers tend not to win Nobel Prizes? Largely, it seems due to the old-fashioned views of the Nobel committee members over the years.

The traditional view used to be that thrillers were low-class. The very term "whodunit" incorporates a grammatical error because it's meant to imply that only uneducated people would want to read these books. Certainly no one, it used to be felt, would ever call them literature.

The modern view, however, is that thrillers are a genre like any other. Four hundred years ago, one of the popular forms of theater in London was the revenge play, complete with a ghost. William Shakespeare wrote one, called it Hamlet, and after that nobody looked down on revenge tragedies. And so with thrillers. There are no inherently "inferior" genres. Everything depends on what you make of them.

Nicci French's The Red Room is a good example of how exciting, disturbing, but also serious and moving, a thriller can be in the hands of a genuinely imaginative writer.

Julie, a woman in her early 30s, arrives back in London from Thailand, Hong Kong and points east. With nowhere to live, she asks to stay in the apartment of her old friend, Kit, a doctor specializing in criminal psychology and the narrator of this tale.

As an inveterate traveler, Julie claims not to be overly fond of reality. For her, travel is essentially a matter of escape. But Kit is advising the police on a murder inquiry and is enmeshed in reality up to her eyeballs.

This involvement, however, is on many levels, not simply the investigative, and this is what makes The Red Room an out-of-the-ordinary book, and such an excellent read.

The world Kit finds herself working in is one of drifters, homeless teenagers, run-down city neighborhoods and ill-lit, dangerous streets. The mutilated body of a teenage girl has been found by a London canal. The police are holding as their prime suspect a 29 year-old down-and-out. He's a loser on every front, a former abused child, and someone who still attracts victimization. Kit suspects the police of procuring dubious evidence against him through sexual entrapment, so she recommends that they release him, even after he had already assaulted her during an interview.

The police reluctantly expand their investigation, and Nicci French gradually introduces us to a cast of some 20 characters. None of them are spectacularly happy. Most of them were psychologically wounded as children, and consequently now face problems in their adult sexual relationships.

What gives immediate and continuing depth to this book is that Kit is presented as also having endured a traumatized childhood. What she watches, struggling all the time to be professionally detached, are patterns of behavior and suffering that she too is only a hair's breadth removed from.

A run-down area of East London, gentrified here and there, is vividly etched. Sex, and especially food, matter a lot to the young doctor-narrator, but as would-be consolations for an inner pain that cannot be soothed, or really even touched.

The result is a grim poem in dispossession, urban bleakness and general isolation. If you feel there's an element of emotional deprivation in your make-up, this book will grip you for reasons that reach deeper than you can perhaps understand.

Nor is the subject as far removed from Taiwan as you might suppose. Teenage suicide, marital break-up, abortion, and abducted children, all elements in this story, are also prominent ingredients of Taiwanese society.

Resentment, frustration, and bleak unhappiness are not merely British phenomena.

Several of the characters are cunningly crafted to represent different responses to this general situation. An independent social worker called Will, for example, is emotionally wounded at a deep level. Having quit a career in the fast lane of a financial brokerage, he has founded a refuge for run-away kids. But when Kit starts a relationship with him, she quickly realizes they are two of a kind. As a result, they can neither be of much help to the other.

This, then, is no fun read. But it is compelling. French is a committed writer who has taken the thriller format to investigate a deeper pain. There are many incidental observations and opinions on offer too. This is the only book I've ever read, for instance, that describes fishing with rod and line as a disgustingly cruel sport.

The London police are generally portrayed as hard-drinking toughs, with little other than prejudice and bravado to guide them in their short-sighted investigations. Kit, who unlike them sees life in depth, not surprisingly comes up with the correct solution in the final pages.

As for the mechanics of manipulation of possible culprits and the springing of a final surprise, necessary to all books of this kind, French is at least averagely competent. Her real strength, however, lies in her treatment of the psychological currents that run beneath the surface, and her very fluent narrative technique.

I picked this book up late one evening and found it difficult to do anything else until I'd finished it two days later. The style is admirable. French doesn't waste words, and there isn't a dull sentence anywhere. Yet hers isn't the tough, hard-boiled manner of many a detective novel. Instead, the book is thoughtful on a number of levels, and appears to owe a lot to a particularly harrowing work of social investigation, Andrew O'Hagan's The Missing (1995), which related the phenomenon of missing children to the world of the British serial killers Fred and Rosemary West.

This, then, is a far better and more intelligent novel than the term "thriller" is usually taken to imply. It's recommended reading if you have no inner traumas, or if you don't mind seeing the ones you've carefully buried under your daily routines nudged gently back into life.

The final judgment on this book, in other words, is "Excellent. But handle with care."

Publication Notes:
The Red Room
By Nicci French
425 Pages
Publisher: Michael Joseph
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