This is the second book I have read of the Roth trilogy -- actually it is the first in the series, though set in the 1990s, about 25 years after the one I blogged about a few days ago. Reverse chronology, you see -- though the books can be read in any order, this is how Andrew Taylor planned them. This is how he puts it on his website:
Like an archaeological dig,
these three novels are designed to strip away the layers of a
psychopath's history.
The structure of the
Roth Trilogy is probably unique in crime fiction - and perhaps in any
sort of fiction. It is composed of interlocking stories; each novel
is self-contained and may be read independently of the others.
Each book discreetly modifies the others, and each of them is written in a different style.
I am now halfway through the third, and earliest book, and am regretting somewhat that I read the first two out of order. Having read the second one first, I knew things about some of the characters' earlier lives which definitely modified my experience of the first novel, and guessed the identity of a central character on that basis. Working backwards as I am doing now is certainly a more fascinating experience and constantly makes you think, Oh -- I see.
One wonderful feature, among many, of this trilogy, is the way each novel is narrated in a different style. The Four Last Things, set in the 1990s, is quite a fast-paced thriller. At the start of the book, Lucy Appleyard, a four-year-old child, is kidnapped by the terrifying psychopathic Angel, a beautiful, plausible woman who, as we soon discover, has already kidnapped and somehow disposed of three other small girls. The novel switches, in alternate chapters, between the perspective of Lucy's mother Sally, a woman priest, and that of the sad, disfunctional Eddie, whose house Angel has appropriated for her horrific activities. Taylor's handling of this aspect of the narration is brilliant -- Eddie is, initially at least, completely in thrall to Angel, who is able to keep her power over him because she understands his own psychological peculiarity -- he loves small girls, though seemingly in a rather touchingly non-sexual way. He is really an innocent, and the reader is frequently one step ahead of him, guessing what some of Angel's puzzling behaviour implies while he is still telling himself it is all quite rational and above board. Like The Judgment of Strangers, this book also deals, in Sally's sections of the novel, with the agonies associated with an attempt to maintain religious belief in the face of horrendous odds.
Because these three books are linked, characters reappear in all three, though obviously at different stages in their lives. Sally's husband Michael, in this book a detective inspector in his mid-thirties, was a small boy fascinated by detective work in The Judgement of Strangers. And David Byfield, who was the narrator and central figure of that book as a man in his forties, here reappears, now an old man, in his role as Michael's godfather and mentor, mistrusted and disliked by Sally, who knows nothing of his, and her husband's, troubled past.
