Piece of My Heart
By Peter Robinson
McClelland & Stewart, 378 pages, $34.99
"I've always been a bit suspicious of events from so far in the past reaching forward into the present," says a character in Piece of My Heart, Peter Robinson's latest Alan Banks novel. "Sounds like the stuff of television." The speaker is Banks's acting superintendent, a cool-talking ambition hound who proves disastrously wrong about many things, not least this sentiment. Because, in fact, the way the past is always galloping up behind us, overtaking us just when we think we've outrun it, is precisely what this novel is about.
In 1969, a murdered girl is discovered in a sleeping bag during the clear-up of an open-air rock concert. When DI Stanley Chadwick, a Second World War veteran and obstinately patrician product of his generation, is detailed to the inquiry, he finds himself mired in the world of psychedelic rock and psychotropic drug-taking, a world guaranteed to ratchet up his irritation. Meanwhile the contemporary narrative, carried almost exclusively by DCI Banks, is jump-started by the discovery of a dead music journalist in a remote Yorkshire village. Robinson waits until almost a third of the way through the book before he drops the first clue that the two cases might be related, and from that moment on the book is a well-orchestrated, mesmerizing slow-mo collision of the past and present.
Stylistically, this series has always been just faintly reminiscent of British Golden Age crime fiction, but don't be fooled by its gentleness: A good dose of contemporary issues spikes the mix, and Robinson's not squeamish about taking on difficult subjects. Alan Banks, the likable veteran of this series, is here in his full, Rebus-esque glory, and although once or twice you suspect Robinson is yanking him out of character solely to serve the plot, there is enough of the world-worn cop here to keep him authentic: It's as if he knows why the unspeakable things happen, but has got tired trying to stop them.
The violent tendencies he's shown in other books are reined in, and instead we find him demonstrating a touchingly ambivalent tenderness toward his son. In fact, this may be where the novel works best: It headlines as a story about murder, yet its true theme is the continuous dance of power and disillusionment that goes on between parent and child. The generational divide will never truly go away, Robinson seems to be saying, and if you want to see it at its most pronounced, look no further than the 1960s.
Any novel exclusively or partly set in the past needs to think very hard about its scene setting, and Robinson's prose is never research-heavy: No lists of brand names or cultural references are squeezed in to remind us how well the novelist has done his research. Instead, he uses the plot to justify many of the period details: vital witnesses fear coming forward because attending a rock festival is just a little too outré; Chadwick has scars on his lungs from a bout of TB; characters live in the cheapest part of London — Notting Hill, a wry joke that won't be lost on any British homeowner.
Likewise, the issues of the time, adoption, drug taking etc. are all present without being forced. Particularly believable is the rock band central to the investigation, the Mad Hatters: While Pink Floyd seems the most likely inspiration here, with Syd Barrett's slide into insanity tackled in the character of Vic Greaves, the band is such a persuasive composite of '60s and '70s bands you might be tempted to put down the book and Google the Mad Hatters, convinced they actually existed four decades ago.
Choosing to set his two narratives 40 years apart pays some dividends for Robinson, working most efficiently and poignantly when we re-encounter the '60s characters in the third millennium, the utopian futures they once dreamed of punctured by the realities of AIDS and long-term LSD damage. But elsewhere, the device kicks up problems: For example, overburdening the opening chapters with characters and confusing time leaps, with the result that the novel is initially surprisingly easy to put down and doesn't really pick up speed until 50 pages in.
From then on, the pace and tone pick up, hinting at startling revelations in the last few pages, and although Robinson doesn't deliver on this promise, giving us a curiously anticlimactic ending, one can't help liking a novel where answers to the crime revolve around an uncrackable code and the quality of a live Led Zeppelin performance. As a fascinating and atmospheric exploration of the way the past intrudes on the present, Piece of My Heart is rather brilliant.
Mo Hayder is the British author of four bestselling crime novels set in Britain and Japan.
