|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
In the week leading up to Guy Fawkes Day, in a year that is more or less now, the City of London is under siege. Financial peculation by one Dexter Cornell of the Findersbury Private Bank has been one scandal too far for Londoners. Rioters are everywhere in the Square Mile and relentlessly moving outside it, with protestors in the streets demanding to Make Capitalism History, or Break the Banks, or simply Disobey. Huge swathes of the City have been marked off with police tape as if they were scenes of crimes that had taken place, not of those that might. And in all this, appropriately enough given that we are just past Halloween and not quite to Guy Fawkes, a serial arsonist and killer is at work. Whether he is using the social disorder as inspiration for his acts or cover for his crimes is unclear. He may even be hoping to inspire further acts of insurrection to the point where the whole of London goes up in flames.
That venerable pair of police detectives, Arthur Bryant and James May, and the specialist police group they are attached to, the Peculiar Crimes Unit, are necessarily deeply committed to identifying the fire-raiser and thwarting any larger ambitions he may have. But this investigation is unusually difficult. In the first place, the culprit is remarkably elusive; indeed he seems barely to exist. Worse, Arthur Bryant is not himself. There is something going wrong with the elderly man and, whatever it is, he seems unable to halt its progression.
Readers familiar with this series know that the principals are improbably old. Indeed, if you have been with them from the start (as I happily have), you will know that they first met as young men during the Blitz, which would have Bryant pushing a hundred and May three years behind. Fowler has boldly solved the difficulty that has ended the career of many a fictional detective by simply ignoring it. Bryant, for example, is wearing his grandfather's Great War trenchcoat, where he would earlier have been wearing the same coat, but his father's. No matter. But worryingly, Arthur is now showing signs of inevitable mortality and one fears for the future of the series.
In the meantime, however, we have BURNING MAN, one of the better installments in the rich career of the matchless pair. Bryant, you may remember, is a man of vast and eccentric interests, one who has a rich store of knowledge of London's past. Nothing that happens in the city is really new. The current wave of protests? As Bryant is happy to remind all who will listen, rebellion, insurrection, and fire are integral to the history of London. Unrest is the Londoner's natural condition. Likewise, just as the Fleet still runs unseen under the streets of the city, the ancient history of religious zeal and conflict, both pagan and Christian, has never run completely dry and still threatens to rise again.
Nevertheless, Arthur is not happy about what might happen and he and the Peculiar Crimes Unit bend every effort to ensure that the worst will not occur. Although their efforts seem doomed to fail, the reader has confidence that they will succeed. The real suspense here centres on Bryant's state of health and his prospects for surviving the novel. The darkness that emanates from the political strife in the city and from the grotesque acts of murder it seems to inspire spreads to include Arthur's fate, making this perhaps the least hopeful novel in the series. We hold our breaths at the end as Bryant and May meet on Waterloo Bridge, the spot where they first formed their partnership, hoping that this is not the final scene.
Though the book seems to be about crises and endings, Fowler manages to regain a great deal of the mad energy and eccentric wit of some the earlier novels, some of which perhaps was lost when the PCU had to move to their new premises in the City of London. THE BURNING MAN is, as result, one of the best in this remarkable series.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2015
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
