Slur is set in Manchester in the 1980s. Except for an occasional jibe @ Mrs Thatcher, I didn’t really spot anything peculiar to the decade in the storSlur is set in Manchester in the 1980s. Except for an occasional jibe @ Mrs Thatcher, I didn’t really spot anything peculiar to the decade in the story. But with the ubiquity today of mobile phone & CCTV cameras, the internet, & texting & IM, a contemporary version of this story would be much harder to make successful. It was almost nostalgic to revisit a period when harassment was limited to rude messages painted in lavatory cubicles.
The 20 y/o Julie goes out to the bars with her BF Rita & their friend Amanda. Rita is what a few years later would be labelled a ‘ladette’ & her idea of a good time is to get Mandy drunk as a skunk & ‘have a laugh’ as she makes a fool of herself. (As some of us survivors of college parties can vaguely but painfully recall even after a good many years, abuse mistaken for humour is by no means confined to English working-class culture.) Unfortunately Amanda dies as the result of excessive partying & the police believe drugs were involved & Julie was responsible. The story opens with a crash, the cops literally banging on Julie’s door. The rest of the story is comprised of the efforts of Julie, Rita, & Julie’s boyfriend Vinny to clear Julie’s name, & find out what really happened to Amanda & who was responsible. Their efforts are hindered rather than furthered by the police, led by DI Bowden, who now replaces Tana French’s ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy as the thickest & most incompetent detective I’ve encountered in recent fiction. Imagine an English Inspector Clouseau who’s nasty, not funny.
I’ve mixed feelings about Slur. The principal characters, along with Julie’s mother Betty, father Bill, & younger sister Claire, are attractive tho’ it takes Bill a while to come around to Julie’s side after he sees her treated like a pariah. I liked how the local culture was depicted tho’ saddened by their lack of aspiration. (Bill thinks @ age 20 Julie should be married & having children & Rita’s horizons seem to be limited to working in a factory, getting tarted-up & going out drinking, & cheap flights to Greece to be with her boyfriend.) Vinny tho’ I expect to succeed as a building contractor & now 30 years later has pots of money but still drives an old Land Rover to visit his building sites. As this is a continuous series, maybe I’ll find out.
But I would have liked more dialogue & action with less summary & description by the narrator of what the characters were thinking & feeling. Given that these characters are not highly articulate, I suspect that Slur would make a better film script than novel, because the performers' actions & expressions could convey the inner selves that they cannot express in words. I also felt that the new character introduced about 2/3 into the book to help solve the mystery was rather pulled out of a hat & that even in the ‘80s more sophisticated spyware was easily available & would have been more convincing even to the benighted DI Bowden.
I may follow up with the sequels to find out what happens to my favourite characters but it may be a while. Yet I am a bit haunted by outcome for the principal villain because I thought it thoroughly appropriate & yet all my ‘better instincts’ should have wished a different fate. Fortunately, characters in story books don’t have souls, so we needn’t care whether or not we like what becomes of them....more
Loading...
