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Over five years, beginning in 1975, Peter Sutcliffe murdered thirteen women and attacked a number of others. David Peace recalls that, as a ten-year-old growing up in West Yorkshire at the time, he genuinely feared that his father might be the Ripper. After all, as the police said, "he had to be somebody's husband, somebody's son," so why not somebody's father? He just as genuinely feared that his mother might become the next victim. These terrors he shared with a lot of children of the same age in Yorkshire at the time. He became, he says, obsessed with the notion of finding the killer, and made pacts with God if he could only find the killer and relieve his anxiety. He didn't, of course, until now, in the four novels that make up the Red Riding Quartet, of which NINETEEN EIGHTY is the third. These novels are different from one another and all are fictionalized accounts of the actual crimes. The names of the principals, victims, police, and even Sutcliffe himself have all been changed, for what Peace is after here is the psychological truth of the events, the appalling mental damage they inflicted on an entire community. In NINETEEN EIGHTY, a policeman, Peter Hunter, has been dispatched with a hand-picked squad to "bloody Yorkshire" to look into what is going on with the police there. What he finds is a sink of corruption involving dubious real estate deals, pay-offs, sexual misconduct, and a determination to maintain an ironclad wall of protection around the cops involved, one that will not stop short of murder. As he himself gets closer to the corrupt heart of the affair, he and his family are threatened, his house burns down, and he is comprehensively rendered ineffective. Ultimately, his very sanity is in doubt. One of the ethical issues that arises in fact-based fiction is the danger of exploiting the misery of real people. In this installment of the Ripper myth, chapters are introduced by a series of "transmissions" set small black type, unpunctuated, uncapitalized streams of not one, but several consciousnesses. These represent the recollections of the Ripper's dead victims, of the Ripper himself, and of the forensic reports of the crimes. They are at once almost impossible to read and the heart of the book, what gives it its gravity. Though their real names have been changed, the victims' sufferings are wholly authentic and appalling and the "transmissions" are disturbing, hallucinatory evocations of the horrors they experienced. What also sets the Quartet apart from much true crime or serial killer tales is that it is intensely political in its approach to the crimes it documents. Peace maintains "Crime fiction has both the opportunity and the obligation to be the most political of any writing or any media, crime itself being the most manifest example of the politics of the time. We are defined and damned by the crimes of the times that we live in." Of course, he is using "politics" in the most general of senses, to refer to the interaction between the individual - criminal, victim, copper - and the larger social organization through or against which they and we all act. And this is what makes this painstaking, if fictionalized, account of these thirty-year-old murders and the failure to stop them so deeply disturbing as we are forced to acknowledge the closeness still of such events to our ordinary lives.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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