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Occupied City (2010)

by David Peace(Favorite Author)

3.29 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0571232027 (ISBN13: 9780571232024)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Faber & Faber

series

Tokyo Trilogy

review 1: There’s a fascinating story buried in Dave Peace’s latest novel, Occupied City. It is the story of a mass murder carried out in the guise of treatment for a dysentery outbreak in order to rob a bank in post war Tokyo. It is a true story and suggests that the killer may have been from the infamous unit 731 that was developing weapons for biological warfare. The story is somewhat hard to piece together due to the experimental style Peace used in this novel. This might have something to do with reading his first novel, 1974, from The Red Riding series recently, which has a more straightforward manner of storytelling. The 13 different narrators are somewhat of a distraction like some of the experimental prose. It was effective in some sections, but I wasn’t particularly... more impressed with his American impersonation of Lt. Colonel Murray Thompson writing his letters home to Peggy. That being said I think it might make a better film than novel. I didn’t know the story and didn’t predict the ending.
review 2: David Peace follows his spectacular "Tokyo Year Zero" with a book that is, if possible, even more staggering: a twelve-voiced account of a notorious mass murder that took place in Tokyo in 1948. Much has been made of his debt to "Rashomon," and comparisons have also been drawn between this novel and "The Waste Land," but what is most fascinating to me is the way Peace once more draws parallels between the murders that form the basis of the book and the destructive impact of war on those who participate in it. As in the previous novel, the killer here (insofar as he is ever truly revealed) is the product of atrocities committed during WWII on behalf of the Japanese army. Peace makes it clear, however, that the Japanese were far from the only ones engaged in the horrifying experiments with bacteriological warfare; every nation, victor and vanquished, is culpable in the crimes and also in their covering-up. The rot here is all-pervasive. Peace also delivers an interesting meditation on the role of the author-as-medium, especially when the author’s theme is an historical event. This matches the voice here: incantatory, mesmerizing, drawing up the voices of people who have died and who, perhaps, never lived—weaving them together into a story that is as intriguing as it is distressing. This is the second novel in a trilogy; Peace has said that he has an overarching plan for the series, so it should be interesting to see what direction he takes from here. less

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