Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

THE RED RIDING TRILOGY – 1974, 1980, 1983 – 2009

Vicious, disgusting, more than gory, just gross, and yet so true to “life” if this is life. It sure is Yorkshire, accent, desolation and misery (more than plain and simple poverty), cruelty, pollution, greed, vice, perversion, etc. spread all over. All evils in one pouch, one bag in West Yorkshire and the motto that “this is the north, where we do what we want,” that’s the great beauty of ugliness.

It will take you three long episodes to reach the culprit and you won’t be surprised at all when you finally come to him. In the meantime the police would have revealed itself the most odious, ferocious and mentally cannibalistic institution you can imagine. Asking a question  for them is necessarily hurting, torturing and a few other things of the sort: breaking fingers, crushing burning cigarettes anywhere you can imagine, stripping the suspects naked, and the films do not show them naked (prudes!). There is not one single person in the police force that is able to do anything regular like find a culprit that is really guilty and bring that one to justice.

One journalist is driven to craziness and some deadly justice enforcing spree, and yet you will know if he was right in his choice of targets at the end of the third film. Another young man, slightly spaced out will be convinced under duress by everyone, probably only in the police, that he killed the girl. And he will end his life in prison. With little chance to be retried since he signed a confession and pleaded guilty.

And quite a few are questioned that way and yet the crimes are going on: kidnapped girls, then raped, and in many ways cut up and carved up and more or less endowed with wings and feathers.

And all that in a society that is rotten to the core, that speculates on the death of as many people as possible with pollution and the exploitation of them as long as they live with projects that are as crazy as they are greedy of shopping malls with cinemas and all kinds of entertainments to empty the billfolds of the gullible submissive slaves of the public till they are empty and they can then commit suicide or die young of any kind of hazardous escaping tentative or industrial pollution. And for the girls and women prostitution and promiscuity are the main two udders of everyday suspended death. You can imagine what the other two are.

And be sure that all the cadres of the police and the most respected people in this society, lay and clerical, are among the small circle of speculators and their only aim is to make money and thus to keep the surrounding society going because you cannot squeeze money out of marginal miserable derelict and impoverished proletariat. No matter what, they must have just a little bit more than their basic needs to be able to spend that little bit more in the traps of the entertaining plotters.

Is it a great trilogy? I do not know but one thing is sure even if at the end the killer is finally put out of the way all the corrupted elite of this part of Yorkshire will not be in any way even questioned, not to speak of prosecuted. After all corruption is the basic human dimension: the survival instinct of the more corrupted declared the fitter, by all means, even selling their parents into slavery and feeding their own children to the industrial sharks of our certainly not post-modern society but definitely pre-modern jungle.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

ROBERT GALBRAITH – THE SILKWORM – 2014

The situation in this thriller is very tricky, intricate, complicated. It’s dealing with the publishing business in London with a vengeance of sorts as if the author had to settle some account with that business. In other words Ms. J.K. Rowling, in her invisibility cape of a pseudonym, is telling London publishers, the direct heirs of the famous Stationers Company, their four truths if not even more, and many other little secrets they might want to keep under the rug. So publishers, editors, agents and authors, all get redressed, repressed and re-ironed to be presentable. And yet nothing is really achieved along that line. The publishing business has no hope of any salvation, at least not before Doomsday. The whole book centers on a so-so mediocre half-successful author  advanced in age who wants a big come-back, like an epiphanic second chance.

His ambition is going to be hi-jacked into a gory bloody horrific crime story that will guarantee his next book to be a full success. But he had not dreamed of ending up in the doggy do of some canine monster.

The suspense and the plot are OK though the whole novel is too slow for this thrilling literary genre. It needs to be denser and go faster. In fact a little bit of editing could shorten the story and make it more dynamic.

Then there are several traditional traits borrowed from classic English detective stories. The first one is the antipathy, if not competitive hostility towards the MET, in other words Scotland Yard. This is maybe slightly too much because it is too intense on the police side of this hostility. Of course Sherlock Holmes had his sidekick in Scotland Yard. Of course Hercule Poirot had his sidekick in Scotland Yard? But Ruth Rendell did not use that feature and it is maybe not of the best taste to highlight the umbilical hatred of Scotland Yard for anything private in the field of police work.

Then the final bringing together of the main suspects for a confrontation is by far too Poirot-like. We could maybe renew that kind of trick and in this book the trick is going against suspense because the final “theory” appears some fifty pages before the end but it is never really revealed before the last chapter but only six pages before the end. That trick kills the realism of the story. That’s frustrating for the reader. Of course when we see Poirot doing this or that in his investigation we know he has something in his mind, but it is not shared at all with any one. So it is acceptable for the reader. But here Strike shares it with Robin but not with the reader. The author as the all-mighty conjurer could be and do better.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU