David Peace single-handedly forged a new crime genre: Yorkshire Noir. The lacerating Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), inaugurated his Red Riding Quartet, with Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) equally powerful and disturbing, showing that innovation was still possible in an exhausted genre. Amazingly, Peace demonstrated that he could create another sequence of breath and ambition -- and Occupied City, the second part of his already acclaimed Tokyo trilogy continues the momentum of the first book, Toyo Year Zero. The contrast with the earlier Yorkshire-set sequence could not be more extreme - except for a similarly dark and merciless view of humanity.
Tokyo Year Zero married a sweeping historical canvas with a tough crime narrative. In the new book, we are in Tokyo in January 1948. The city is occupied (for the third year), and a man arrives at a bank talking of a dysentery outbreak that he has been set to treat. Members of the bank staff are given a liquid which, he says, will save them from the outbreak - but within minutes they are dead. The murderer leaves the bank, having robbed it - and a manhunt the like of which Japan has never seen before is inaugurated. The mainspring of Peace's plot here allows him to create blistering and brilliantly imagined picture of a whole society at a significant moment in its history, riven with betrayal and guilty complicity - and no crime is too massive for cover-up.
As ever, Peace does not grant us an easy read - he's not for everyone. But those with a readiness to confront the less comfortable side of human nature - and who feel that the best books are designed to challenge us - will not hesitate to investigate Occupied City, and will be impatient for the third and concluding part of the sequence. --Barry Forshaw