#44 Occupied City, by David Peace (Faber and Faber Limited)

I was planning to read Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City, the second novel in David Peace's Tokyo trilogy, back to back, but found myself so drained by the first instalment that I needed some light relief - a role PG Wodehouse fulfilled perfectly.

I enjoyed Occupied City more than Tokyo Year Zero, but many of the comments I made in that review apply once more. There is significantly less repetition, less use of the stylised prose which Peace favours, in favour of interwoven sentences which see entire chapters use italics and CAPITAL LETTERS to convey three disparate strands. As before, it's extremely complex and hard to follow, and the overall effect is that the mind focuses on the sensory impact of the words more than the story itself.

Rereading my review of Tokyo Year Zero, it struck me that I should have given an example of the complicated sentence structure Peace commonly uses, so here's a quick excerpt, taken completely at random, from Occupied City:

"Beneath the Black Gate, in its upper chamber, in the candle-light, no plague-light; white light, hospital-white, laboratory-white, then grey, an overcast-skin-grey then open vein blue, blue and now green, a culture-grown-green then yellow, yellow, thick-caught-spittle-yellow, streaked sticking-string-red, then black;
black-black, drop-drop, black-black
step-step, in the plague-light
drop-drop, step-step,
in the plague-
light-"

And there's just short of 300 pages of that (which is less than Tokyo Year Zero, admittedly).

The plot is also better, by the way. We've moved on a couple of years in post-Second World War occupied Tokyo and now police are investigating a bank robbery in which 12 people were murdered (poisoned). As usual, it's based on a true story and an author's note later reveals an appeal to clear the supposedly guilty party's name continues to this day, posthumously.

Interestingly, Peace has borrowed the Rashomon format, whereby the same event is revisited and retold by several different protaganists, shedding new light on events in the process. This is set against another investigation being carried out into Japan's biological warfare operation.

Each chapter is different. We are treated to the transcript of a detective's notebook, the recollections of a journalist, the testimony of a survivor and ultimately an account by the man who confessed to the crime. It's hugely varied and powerful, and if you want a book to really challenge you, start here.

So, rating time:

#44 Occupied City, by David Peace (Faber and Faber Limited) - 7/10

Next up: Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane (Harper Collins)

Click here for the full list of books so far, and their rating