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.
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