You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
craigbruney 's review for:
Nineteen Eighty Three
by David Peace
None of the Red Riding quartet stand well on their own - they can only really be read as a collected work. The overall theme of the enormous cost in human lives and immense suffering of hypocrisy and corruption is interesting and well developed. The books use a fascinating device of shifting point of view from one novel to the next, both in terms of character and time, to develop that theme and gradually fill in the broader story. For instance, a character seen only as an antagonist in 1974 becomes the central character from whose point of view the story is told in 1977 and then recurs in the latter two books as an important and sympathetic character. A character referred to only in a few passages of 1977 is the dominate character driving all of 1980.
The prose, in an apparent effort to be stylistic, often comes off as pretentious, repetitive, and just plain over-stuffed. Many characters are left only partially explored, the exact details of what happened to them and why is almost always left hazy and ambiguous, though the point may be that the exact details don't matter so long as we can link their fate back to the overarching theme of the cost of corruption. The series as a whole is also just depressing - in tone and in theme (with one small but significant exception partway through the final book, though the ending reverts to form).
The prose, in an apparent effort to be stylistic, often comes off as pretentious, repetitive, and just plain over-stuffed. Many characters are left only partially explored, the exact details of what happened to them and why is almost always left hazy and ambiguous, though the point may be that the exact details don't matter so long as we can link their fate back to the overarching theme of the cost of corruption. The series as a whole is also just depressing - in tone and in theme (with one small but significant exception partway through the final book, though the ending reverts to form).