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
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS