LITERARY FICTION
TOKYO REDUX by David Peace (Faber £16.99, 480 pp)
TEN years in the writing, this mighty slab of a novel concludes David Peace’s Tokyo trilogy and centres on the still unexplained death of President Shimoyama, head of the National Railways of Japan, whose mutilated body was found scattered on a rail track in 1949.
Was it suicide or murder? Leading the investigation is American detective Harry Sweeney, but he’s soon mired in a gloopy fog of rumour and counterrumour and hampered by communists and the Japanese police, not to mention the relentless rain.
Fans of Peace (whose novels include the Red Riding Quartet) will know him to be far more interested in exploring a haunted collective psyche than in solving a crime and this extremely dense, savagely violent novel presents the fallout of Shimoyama’s death as a sort of viral madness, contaminating everyone it touches.
Yet Peace’s monochrome prose, which uses repetition and inner voices to weirdly nerve-racking effect, takes some stomaching. He’s always worth reading, but, if you’ve yet to do so, here’s not the place to start.
WE RUN THE TIDES by Vendela Vida (Atlantic £14.99, 272 pp)
FEMALE adolescence is a seemingly inexhaustible subject for novelists and Vendela Vida refreshes its ruptures and doubts with a deft and unsettling touch in her sixth novel, set in San Francisco where she grew up.
It’s the 1980s and an encounter with a stranger in a car has sent a riptide through a close-knit group of privately educated school girls, three of whom maintain the man was behaving inappropriately.
Our narrator, Eulabee, maintains she saw nothing odd at all and is promptly ostracised. But then one of the girls — heiress to a sugar fortune — disappears.
Vida expertly presents female teenage sexuality as a crazy fever dream of conspiracy, fear and make-believe in this enigmatic novel which never quite does what you expect it to.
Eulabee is an irresistible narrator; subversive, witty, vulnerable and entirely memorable, with the faintest whiff of Holden Caulfield. Strange, startling and rather brilliant.
CWEN by Alice Albinia (Serpent’s Tail £14.99, 336 pp)
ANOTHER missing woman is at the heart of Cwen, set on an archipelago off the British east coast where women are fully in control: of the law, money, civic institutions and the way children are raised.
Eva Levi founded the community and is its beating heart but she has not been seen since venturing out in her boat in a north-easterly wind and, with vultures circling including her two venal sons chasing their inheritance, her supporters fear for her matriarchal vision.
But goodness, what heavy weather Albinia makes of her tantalising premise. Her novel takes the form of an inquiry into Eva’s disappearance, in which multiple witnesses are called to give evidence, with their relationship to Eva providing much of the back story.
It’s a desperately inert and thoroughly muddling format that works against the vitality of Albinia’s themes and makes it almost impossible to engage with any of the characters. I’m afraid I found it quite deadly.