Lock all the doors, there's a madman around!

One of the books I found in Berrima last week-end was Suburbs of Hell by Randolph Stow.

It's set in a decaying fishing village in East Anglia in the early eighties. Half the houses were abandoned after the War and are derelict. People drink far too much and gossip in snug little pubs. Then there's an unexpected murder. Then another. And another. Fingers start pointing but the suspects keep turning up dead. So far so good but I finished it without being able to say exactly what happened.

My problem is that the preamble to the first murder is described in the first person from the point of view of a witness that you think is the murderer but, by golly, I still don't know who it was or if in fact it's meant to be Death itself as a witness, coming like a thief in the night and the murderer was actually one of the suspects.

Stow's dressed it up with quotes from seventeenth century revenge tragedies (the Duchess of Malfi, The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, the Spanish Tragedy) and Beowolf . I found this annoying on the way through but in retrospect think he was trying to hint at the monster within arising (Beowulf) and then at the clunky motives of subsequent murders that don't solve anything in response to misplaced suspicions. Probably. This still doesn't really help me be sure about what happened first.

At the end he has an extract from the newspaper of the of day of the coroner's report into the last death which he puts next to headlines about all the accidents, wars and terrorist incidents going on around the world. So even though there was this terribly menacing series of events, it's really only a tiny part of the world. I guess.

The book's really good at describing scenery and uses dialect often enough to make you hear how the locals talked. This bit is where a character's coming back to the world with the early spring:

Unimportant things pleased him unreasonably: that ragwort was flowering yellow in the crevices of old walls, that fields across the estuary were bright green with new barley, that the sea was like a polished grey stone with a sheen on it, as if reflecting a blue-green sky. Oystercatchers waded and searched, gorse was brilliant in the weak sun. The crude bright colours of man, on fishermen’s dinghies and on a line of beach-huts, brought back a pleasure he had once taken in a new box of coloured pencils.

In a different place, in a bay of the estuary, a plain of sea-purslane and sea-aster carved with shining brown runnels, he watched mallard waddle and swim, and flocks of dunlin skitter away like blown white smoke over the sculpted, sky-mirroring mud. (p78)

Aw! pretty!

I loved the books of his set in Australia not that I remember the detailis. Tourmaline was in the outback after some sort of apocalypse and was a bit disturbing but really good. And The Merry-go-Round in the Sea was fabulous. This one is going to keep me wondering for a while.