CRIME: The Lovers By John ConnollyHodder Stoughton, 390pp. £11.99
SOME YEARS ago, Stephen King, the bestselling author of contemporary horror fiction, arrived in Australia with a friend to ride two Harleys from Sydney to Perth, camping along the way. Before they set out, King bought some local thrillers for campfire reading, including Funnelweb by Australian thriller writer Richard Ryan, which is described on its cover as “a ground breaking thriller encarnalising the evil in us all”. A few months later, Ryan received a letter via his publisher from King. It said, “Hey man, you sure scared the daylights out of me!”
John Milton may well have started the noirthriller genre with Paradise Lost, where good and evil take the form of feuding angels, with Satan as the main protagonist. In the Judeo-Christian world, where sin and the Fall of Man are synonymous, the imagined existence of evil never lies far beneath consciousness. We are predisposed to imagine ourselves the prey of formless malevolent forces, particularly in winter on dark creaking nights. Events surrounding death often enlarge the imagination and allow claims of supernatural intervention to be taken seriously. We are not too far removed from medieval times, when witches were burned at the stake. These are some of the intangible yet powerful forces that flap darkly at the edges of John Connolly's latest novel, The Lovers.
In a previous novel by Connolly, The Killing Kind(2001), in which private investigator Charlie Parker also appears, the reader is warned: "This is a honeycomb world. Be careful where you step". In such a world, every next step is fraught with danger, every shadow contains nameless forces intent on destruction. "[These forces] live in pain, and exist only to visit that pain on others . . . Sometimes, it is better to keep your eyes on the gutter for the fear that . . . you might catch a glimpse of them."
Connolly's fictional territory is Maine, New England, and the setting of The Loversis firmly that of the roman policier, followed by the word noir, underlined. The reader is dropped into a world of Irish cops, booze, murder, grief, regret, snow, darkness and primal terror. In The Lovers, the era is that of Obama, although the attention of most of the characters is on the past. Sex is mentioned only in passing, and bad language mostly eschewed. When a character discovers a grotesquely mutilated corpse, the victim of unknown forces, he says with understated effect, "Ah, hell".
The beat of former-cop-turned-private-investigator Charlie Parker, will be familiar to those who have followed Connolly's career since 1999, when Parker was introduced in Every Dead Thing. (Connolly is a best-selling novelist, and earlier this year, at the Ennis Book Club Festival, a monster book club assembled to discuss his novel, The Book of Lost Things.)
Parker’s brooding introspection makes noir look like a field of buttercups. He grieves unrelentingly for the murder of his wife and daughter. His current relationships with his partner and new daughter have failed, meanwhile he is swept back in time to try and solve the puzzle of his own father’s grisly end: why, when Charlie was a teenager, did cop Will Parker one night shoot dead a teenage couple in their car, then end his own life by “eating his gun”?
Parker acts as a magnet for the evil that seems to occasionally threaten all of us from time to time: “. . . he was drawn to evil, and evil, in turn, was drawn to him”.
He is both catalyst and willing victim. In his search for the truth surrounding his father’s death, Parker revisits the world of his boyhood, interviewing his dad’s once close, former cop associates, one dying of cancer, another a closeted gay with an impeccable taste in wine (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, 1995). Haunted by the “niggling memory of a whispered remark . . . that he was not his father’s son”, Parker uncovers a ghoulish trail of death from all those years before.
As he does so, the gathering likelihood emerges that the spirits of these bloody perpetrators have returned, this time with Parker as their target.
Connolly, whose narrative switches dizzily between multiple points of view, including Parker’s in the first person, enlists nature as a witness to unfolding horrors. A field of wheat, gone to seed, “ripples and eddies, [its] unity . . . replaced by confusion”. Malign spirits arrive under cover of mist: “. . . the dead of winter brought something strange and different . . . It brought the mist. It brought them”.
Evil often takes the form of a “hunter”. Trying to understand how malevolence takes human form, a character explains how certain species of wasp larvae take over the bodies of spiders and control their functions. Or it may be that apocalyptic Old Testament angels are the vectors of evil, inhabiting the bodies of humans.
Parker battles heroically against dark omniscient powers that we all intermittently suspect are stacked against us. Connolly has brilliantly created a threshold world of suggestion, fear and sleep-depriving ambiguity. He sure scared the daylights out of me.
Peter Cunninghams most recent novel, The Sea and the Silence, is published by New Island. He is also the author of eight thrillers, including those published under the names Peter Lauder and Peter Benjamin