Review of The Dramatist by Ken Bruen (Brandon, 2008)

Jack Taylor is sober and down to five cigarettes a day. He’s as near to clean living as he’s been in years. When a former dealer asks him to help investigate the death of his sister, Jack is reluctant to get involved. Then a second student is found dead, her body accompanied by a book of plays by Synge. Reluctantly, Jack starts to probe and prod, but there are dark forces at work in the town and they either want to sign Jack up to their cause or suffer the consequences. Suffering though is what Jack does best.

Ken Bruen’s books are dark and brooding affairs, written in a sparse, engaging literary prose. For me, sometimes the text feels a little too sparse, begging for a little more elaboration, but they are nonetheless engaging, powerful, layered tales. His stories rarely have complex puzzles, they are more structured as unfolding. The Dramatist is no different. In it he demonstrates a keen observational eye, capturing the nuances of Irish society, especially the intricacies of inter-personal relations. There’s a strong sense of place and the plot has some nicely interwoven strands and intertextuality. The resolution of the crimes is relatively straightforward, but that’s hardly the point of his stories: they are about the journey not the destination. Though in The Dramatist, the destination is a powerful punch to the gut, despite it being well signposted. A fine slice of Irish noir.

Lazy Sunday Service

Finished off The Dramatist by Ken Bruen last night. I knew what was coming with the sucker punch, it had been well signposted, but it still took all the air out of me. Not one to finish at gone midnight if you want to sleep soundly. If I was Jack Taylor I'd lose myself in drink.

My posts this week:
The Secret in Their Eyes
Review of Pariah by Dave Zeltserman
Motivations
Review of Anarchy and Old Dogs by Colin Cotterill
When it flows, it pours

Review of London Boulevard by Ken Bruen (Do Not Press, 2001)

On the day that Mitch is released from prison after serving three years for a crime he doesn’t remember committing, Billy Norton picks him up with a bottle of whiskey and puts him up in a plush London flat. All Mitch wants to do is keep an eye on his mentally disturbed sister, and try and go straight. Norton though has other ideas, throwing a release party that half the South London underworld attends. They want Mitch to help Norton run their loan books, turning over anyone who won’t or can’t pay. Mitch wants to stay away, managing to get a job as the handyman to a once-famous, reclusive aging actress, Lillian Palmer, who dreams of making a stage comeback, but the death of Joe – a homeless, Big Issue seller – and the tug of the underworld, means that escape is futile. Instead, Mitch is drawn into a deadly game that he knows is unlikely to have a happy ending.

Ken Bruen seems to write effortlessly with a strong first person voice – the prose flows with great cadence; it’s as if it’s he’s sitting in a pub with you recounting the story over a few drunken pints. In London Boulevard he manages to convey a scene and the essential essence of characters in a few words, enabling the story to fly along. It almost feels like a movie script, which is where I think the book underplays things a little. I found myself wanting to slow things down a little in places and find out more about the back story and relationships between characters or to find out more about a particular bit of the storyline. The plot where it concerns Mitch’s re-absorption into the South London underworld and his relationship with his sister is very good, though the plotline concerning his attempt to go straight by working as a handyman doesn’t work quite so well given its plot device nature, but it does bring things to a typical Bruen noir ending. There’s also a nice use of intertextuality throughout. Overall, Bruen’s voice and writing win out to provide an entertaining slice of London noir.

P.S. I’ve just noticed that the book has recently been made into a movie of the same name – released in November 2010. Having watched the trailer - it's clear that the movie makers have rehashed the entire thing and it's hopelessly miscast with respect to the book. Why they have done this is beyond me, the book would have made a decent movie without being entirely re-written and populated with other characters.