The Book Depository Sirens by Joseph Knox

Author: William Donelson

Rating: 5

Review: W O W ! Extraordinary. First novel by Knox, a masterpiece. Read this book NOW. Complex and very dark, painful and relentless, brutally real and noir and powerful, with superb prose... And best of all, the tragic hero is my favourite kind of gumshoe: the Philosopher-Detective. A truly extraordinary book. Astounding that this is Knox's first novel. Although the prose and pacing are a bit uneven in the first few chapters, Knox soon finds his true voice and then captures you and drags you along relentlessly, ever deeper, increasing in confidence, complexity and power, rushing pell-mell until the surprising, unseen denouement, a resolution that's far better than I expected. Knox's disgraced young cop Aidan Waits is savagely twisted by the unremitting greed of the powerful and the crooked, by the depraved, and so cruelly by the complicity of the beautiful, naive victims. He's betrayed most of all by his own flaws, a Greek-tragedy noir masterpiece. (As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.) The story is set in the dark and cold city of Manchester, itself struggling to survive the new century, and replete with beautiful and tragic young femme fatales, the Sirens, to whom we and Aidan are helplessly drawn. There are the usual brutal villains, a police commander dubiously trustworthy, a rich and powerful but distant father to the beautiful and vulnerable Isabelle, and Aidan's outrageous yet fascinating friend, "Bug". The primary villain has some questionable heroic qualities towards Aidan, and there are a number of secondary police and other characters of unknown loyalty and motives. All of the characters are beautifully drawn, free of cliché and completely real and alive. Even the minor characters are rendered with care and love. There are so many quotes from Knox's wonderful prose that I'd like to share, so much passion, so much noir, but I’ve included here just a few. From page 2, already powerful: "All I knew was where it had started, a year before. The three strikes against me and all the reasons I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t have explained the girls, the women, who had briefly entered my life. Briefly changed it. [He] wouldn’t have understood their laughs, their indignations, their secrets. For the rest of the night my eyes drifted to the people on the street, the girls, the women, and I felt like I was seeing the lives they wouldn’t live." Page 44, Aidan meets Sarah Jane. "The truth is that she was a cruel kind of beautiful. Someone you might remember on your deathbed, wondering where your courage had been on the day you met, wondering why your courage only ever surfaced at the wrong time and for people who weren’t worth it." Page 66, Aidan turns to booze and amphetamines, too often. "The speed made me feel omnipresent and untouchable. I was everywhere, setting a hundred different moving parts in motion. The people were just things seen from a distance. The unblinking, lit windows on a tower block." Page 112, Aidan thinks about his childhood in the orphanage. "The male dormitory was filled with boys like me. Around my age, and all new arrivals. Now I see that the personality types –quiet, sullen, outrageous and violent –were all just different expressions of fear. I suppose mine was somewhere in the middle. I watched everything and gave away as little as possible about myself. We hadn’t been allowed to take our things with us, and I thought of the facts of my life as a kind of currency. Not valuable, but the last thing I had left to hide on my person. Only to be used in case of emergencies. It’s a bad habit I’ve never quite broken." Page 174 "The daylight was awful. It floodlit the insane, the terminally ill, turned loose again for the day, laughing and crying and pissing their pants through the streets. It was like the lights going up at last orders, turning the women from beautiful to plain, exposing the men for what they all are at their worst. Ugly, identical." Page 187 "When I started walking it was still early. I tried to disappear into the streets again, just another vagrant that your eyes scan past as you cross a road. Weak, white-grey light thawed the city, the traffic flowing again like blood in its veins. I wanted to be swept along with it and forget myself. To see my reflection warp and alter in the bottles behind a bar. I saw the same afternoon tug in other people, too. Invisible lassoes around their waists, pulling them into street-side pubs." Page 192, Aidan meets with one of the Sirens in a pub. Quote: ‘You sound like you’re saying goodbye.’ ‘Just don’t get to know me.’ She looked away. ‘It’ll be easier if you don’t get to know me.’ There was always an edge of performance with [girl], but when I think of her, when I think of the real her, I think of that night. Her hair up, that jacket, that skirt, that conflict. I felt the second drink working on me. Putting the beat back into the music, the shine back on every surface. I didn’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t know what she was trying to say. I never really got to know her. Page 262 "The dismal grey morning had turned into a dismal grey day. The pavements were blocks of ice under my feet, and I could feel the cold through the soles of my shoes. I thought about the past, the sunspots. The terrifying blackouts of my youth. I thought about never seeing my sister again. I thought about [girl]. First scared, then alone, then dead." Page 357 "It had been dark for a couple of hours. When our headlights penetrated the gloomy interiors of surrounding cars, all kinds of characters were lit up like staged vignettes. Some looked back at us, blank-eyed, wondering what kind of couple the Bug and I were. Some stared vacantly straight ahead. I felt something lurch inside me when we started up again. A part of me could have sat in that traffic for ever. The end, I thought. It’s only the end." Last page.... Wow. Knox creates an extraordinary ending here, an incredible homage to Marlowe's lament for the girl "Silver Wig" in The Big Sleep , "...and I never saw her again"... The saddest ending in all of noir, recalled deep in the heart of every one of us who has ever loved and lost - - "I watched [her] from the window, my hand pressing hard into the glass. There should be a word for it. That phantom limb, reaching out from your chest, towards things you’ll never have. She crossed the road with wide, lovely strides, and I always wonder what she went on to. The last shred of sunlight caught her hair when she turned the corner, like the start of one thing and the end of another. The dusk itself. I never saw her again."

Author: Siltone

Rating: 3

Review: Like many other readers, I fell for the hype surrounding this novel, before buying a copy with my hard-earned cash. In its favour, it started good, and I did like the writing style of this new kid on the literature block, Joseph Knox. However, I ultimately couldn't take to the main character, Aidan Waits. Like many cops, in many novels, here was a guy that had a drinking problem, and this issue led to him making some bad decisions, particularly where his job was concerned. And, like many cops, in many novels, he gets a last chance to redeem himself. For me, Waits was not sufficiently fleshed out, as a result I couldn't decide whether to forgive him his mistakes, his drug habit, and his other short-comings - and in turn be on his side throughout his trials and tribulations. Anyway, he's sent undercover to investigate an enigmatic criminal going by the name of Zain Carver. This character was supposed to have charisma and charm, but I really didn't get that impression because, apart from being tall, handsome and rich, he didn't really have the 'patter' to go along with one who was deemed 'mesmerising' to the girls. This was a novel set mainly in what must be the bleakest, darkest corners of Manchester. At times, I wanted the characters to at least venture into the more vibrant, cultured areas of the city - if only for contrast. Also, given its dark themes, I would have expected some black humour, which was sadly lacking. To sum up, this was well-written, gritty, and tense, with a few curve balls thrown in to keep this reader on his toes, but by the end it didn't quite have what it takes to make it onto my 'memorable reads' list.