The Dispatcher

Ryan David Jahn
The Dispatcher

Macmillan UK, 2011

Ian Hunt is a police dispatcher in small town Bulls Mouth, Texas. Most days Ian plays solitaire on his computer, occasionally distracted by calls about lost keys or beating by a drunken husband. Four months ago, he buried his daughter Maggie: the procedure was formal, the girl's body was never found after she was abducted seven years ago out of the bedroom window. After his wife divorced him, Ian lives alone in a small apartment, drunk unconscious by the end of the day to fall asleep faster.

At the end of one shift Ian receives a call from a girl asking for help. Hunt recignizes the voice: it is his missing daughter’s, alive, but someone is chasing her. Now the 14-year-old Maggie did not have time to tell his father who abducted her, the attacker grabs her and takes away.

Who kidnapped Maggie and where she was all those years, we learn in the initial chapters of the novel: a local hospital janitor Henry Dean for seven years held the girl in the basement. And Maggie was not the first one he abducted and kept locked. Now after the phone call Maggie expects help from her father, and Hunt will do everything possible to bring his daughter back.

The main feature of the novel lies in the fact that the name of the abductor is known from the start. David Jahn relies not on ingenious solutions (guess who the villain), but on the psychology of all the participants of the drama. The story is told from points of view of three characters: a chapter from Hunt’s point of view, then Maggie’s, then Henry’s. Jahn puts his cards on the table, but he has a few aces up his sleeve.

If the second Jahn’s novel «Low Life» was claustrophobic thriller narrated by one protagonist, the structure of Jahn’s debut is similar to the third. The debut «Acts of Violence» also switches narrators, but then it turned out too fragmented picture, which is why «Low Life» was stronger work. «The Dispatcher» is more compressed book, and the different points of view make the story fuller. Each participant sees what is happening in his or her own way, and each of them is convincing. Stylistically Jahn is integral, no matter who of the narrators tells a story, you do not have the feeling that all three characters monotonically mumble with the same voice. Jahn captivates emotional pressure, he even sometimes causes us to sympathy for monster Henry.

Store is no sore, and in addition to psychology there will be more decent action, violence, driving on a deserted highway. «The Dispatcher» was published not only in the UK, but also in the U.S., and I’m pleased to see that Jahn finally started to be recognized at home, too. This author is uncompromising and emotional; he deserves an audience wider than he has now.

Low Life

Ryan David Jahn

Low Life


Macmillan, 2010

Loner-accountant Simon Johnson goes to work even on weekends to kill time in his worthless life. In the evenings, he gets drunk to fall asleep faster and not think about nothing. The whole social life of Simon comes to communicating with two colleagues during the lunchbreak. On the road from work, Simon occasionally calls in video shop to watch a porno movie in the booth. Simon’s meaningless life is over one night, when someone breaks into his apartment and wants to kill Simon. Not getting lost in the darkness, Simon in self-defense kills the stranger, who looks exactly like Simon. Thinking that the police won’t understand the situation, would it be self defense or not (and Simon almost smashed the head of the attacker), Simon puts the body in a bath filled with ice. All that now remains for Simon to do is find out who the attacker is and why he wanted to kill Simon.

If the previous novel by Ryan David Jahn «Acts of Violence» was solid, but undistinguished thriller, this is quite outstanding one. Very entangled plot, rising till the end of the books suspence, pressing reality of the situation, the psychopath protagonist, the inexplicable cruelty - all this is enough to get a quality reading. But Jahn does not stop there. He tells the story not as an omnipotent author who knows what will happen to the hero on the next page, but as a counterpart of Simon, who knows no more about what is happening than the protagonist. Simon is not a great detective with excellent logic, not a man with connections. He can not untwist cleverly woven network of puzzles withing a few hours. He is a sociopath, a loner, a little man, who only with his own assertiveness can solve his problem.

Simple style is for a simple man, and the author achieves high level of paranoia in the first place because of his style. Simon thinks of simple sentences, speaks simple sentences, and acts simply but well.

The answer will be terrible, but Simon knew it from the moment when decided to leave the body of the stranger in his own bathroom.

Acts of Violence

Ryan David Jahn
Acts of Violence

Pan Books, 2010

Ryan David Jahn's debut novel by is based on real events that happened in New York in the 60s. Katrina Marino came back from work at night, when at the yard of her home she was attacked by a maniac with a knife. After leaving the girl bleeding on the pavement, a man has gone. Several neighbors hear cries for help, but none of them do not even call the police and do not go down to help a wounded girl. All the neighbors have their problems, bleeding neighbor is not on first place in their list of priorities. A young man discusses with his dying of an incurable disease mother draft in the army. Two married couples exchange partners in order to experience new feelings in sex. A black man comes up with a plan to hide the fact that his wife hit by a car a child. A man wants to commit suicide. While the neighbors themselves are on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Katrina is crawling on the pavement, hoping to reach her own flat, the killer realizes that his job is not finished and returnes to the scene.

Jahn in his novel uses a narrative technique, which successfully at one time director Alejandro González Iñárritu employed in his films: short chapters tell stories of each of the characters from the victim to the murderer, and the reader is waiting for a dozen different fates finally interwine, but this does not happen. All the neighbors, as well as the victim and the murderer, are united only by one house and one night, but there is no explosive effect, linking all the characters. The book's characters are linked not by action, and inaction, non-action. But these "good neighbors" (this is the American title of the book) won’t have to regret what happened. The events of that night will quickly erase from their memory. This did not happen to them, this happened to someone else. Jahn has enough skill and intelligence to not teach a reader a morality, the author is already reticent. He takes away all the unnecessary from the text, leaving the pain, fear and darkness.

In this gloomy book, Jahn shows how much damage can bring inaction.

Kraken

China Miéville
Kraken

Macmillan, 2010

The beginning of this novel, perhaps, would elicit a sigh of disappointment at someone: another story of the secret police department that investigates cases involving otherworldly phenomena. However, after 60 pages it becomes clear that «Kraken» is much more - large, commensurate with the grandeur with kraken novel, both realistic and postmodern.

Billy Harrow, the protagonist of the novel, works in the Natural History Museum, where in the Darwin Center main exhibit is a giant squid, Kraken. Billy conducts a tour, the group is approaching the room with a huge clam, but entered in the hall, everyone can see that kraken has disappeared. The police interrogate Billy, but he does not know anything about theft, he is in shock. Interrogating Billy policemen are a special department, the FSRC (the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit) and offer him to work for them. Billy is scared and does not want to get involved. Soon our hero is kidnapped by the two most dangerous men in London, Goss and Subby. They lead him to the Tattoo, another criminal who actually is tattoo - a tattoo on the body of a man. Tattoo also wants to know from Billy, where kraken and how Billy was involved in its theft. From torture by Goss and Subby scared curator is saved by Dane Parnell, he worked as a security guard at the museum. Moreover, Parnell is one of krakenists: his church worships kraken. Parnell also needs to know who stole his god. All parties need kraken, but no one knows who took it.

«Kraken» is a very funny novel. Miéville puts one layer of absurdity to another, one mad plot twist to another, one original method on the other, if all taken at face value, you can be sorely disappointed. But if in the overall dark atmosphere and in anticipation of the apocalypse you could make out the irony of the author, you will laugh and laugh page by page. Well, in fact: the giant squid as a god; iPods as a means of protection; people folded in the form of origami to the size of the box; tattoo GG Allin on the body of a century dead; flickering bulbs as a sign of SOS; one of the possible kidnappers of clam is a fan of Star Trek. Almost every chapter has something that makes at least smile, but it should be understood that «Kraken» is not a parody. It's not a parasite on any topic, it is quite original.

Separate topic is the language of the book. The whole book is written in British English, sort of, full of slang and sophisticated swearing. Sometimes it is difficult to break through such language "windfall", but, first of all, it's almost always funny, and secondly, we must understand that almost all the characters in the novel in one degree or another connected with the criminal, and thirdly, Miéville is a great stylist (even difficult to say against this novel, what prevails here, a plot or a style), so after the first hundred pages you get used, and then you will get a huge pleasure, really. Here are a few paragraphs, for example:
«THE TATTOO WAS GOING ON. HIS HIRED GUNS RAGED AND VIOLATED trusts that had held for decades, all the way through everything, hunting for the quarry they had had and lost.
The Chaos Nazis were nothing, of course. Who was afraid of them now, drowned, screaming and up-fucked? The freelancers, the full-timer knuckleheads and others were happy to audition for the newly open position of lead bogeymen, and the UMA pickets were unwilling bit parts in these violent run-throughs and résumé-building attacks. Wati was gone from the room above Camden, back, gone, back, shoring up, fixing and failing.
“Tattoo’s gone fucking batshit,” Collingswood said. “What is he doing? Has anyone spoken to him?”
“Won’t talk,” said Baron. He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “We can’t bloody find him.”
“He doesn’t need our permission,” Vardy said. The three sat like a support group for the morose.
“Come on,” said Baron. “I don’t employ you two for your looks. Talk this out.”
“We’ve got the Tattoo declaring war,” Vardy said. “Sending Goss and Subby in here. Dealing with our prisoners.”»

Sometimes the novel is sluggish. It's a pretty densely populated, and it sometimes hurts the book: Miéville describes, extremely charmingly and even plausibly, various layers of London from Londonmancers to radio-in-his-body man, but behind the abundance of episodic character the author loses London itself, which was conceived was very important. As a result, a sense of impending doom is there, but that's in place of the city is white spot.

That «Kraken» is also metafiction indicates at least a presence in the book an important component in the form of ink, and in the final letters will play their role.

If someone says that this novel is not as good as the previous Miéville’s novels, I'm puzzled: what's better? Delightful reading, without any doubts.