The Red Riding Quartet

It's highly unusual for me to buy a book just because I liked its television/film adaptation, but that's precisely what I did after watching Channel 4's excellent trio of Red Riding dramas.

Before 1974, the first instalment, I'd barely heard of its author David Peace - I knew he'd written something about football (The Damned United), a sport that holds no interest for me whatsoever, but little more.

The Red Riding television series managed to recreate the nicotine and beer infused world of seventies/eighties Yorkshire with a surprising ease when you consider the comparative lack of finances (Peace's second book, 1977 wasn't even filmed due to budget constraints), and depicted a murky world of police corruption, secrecy and brutality.

Peace's original books are even better. Featuring a tangled web of characters, plot lines and hidden links that six hours of television could not hope to replicate, the Red Riding quartet (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983) is shot through with a mesmerising style of writing that, once experienced, is hard to shake - it's a repetitive, mantra-like prose that emerges fully formed in 1974 (which was, it should be pointed out, Peace's debut novel) and simply gets better.

By the final book, there are so many interweaving characters, so many events unfolding past and present, that the whole narrative begins to groan under the weight of it all. Allow your concentration to slip, even for a sentence or two, and you're suddenly lost in a sea of grim events.

Indeed, Red Riding's events are so unrelentingly grim that putting one of these books down feels like coming up for air - the constant descriptions of police-sanctioned torture, killings, beatings and brutality are horribly oppressive.

There are explicit references to Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four everywhere, and the dreadful occurences in 'the belly', where suspects are tortured into giving statements in the most disturbing ways imaginable, have obvious parallels with Winston Smith's encounter with Room 101. The phrase 'put your hands flat on the table' isn't one I'll forget in a hurry.

Real life events, like the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, are worked into Peace's fiction so effortlessly that it becomes difficult to tell where the fiction begins and reality ends - a conjuring trick the writer uses to narcotic effect.

And with the Metropolitan Police's alleged involvement in the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 demonstrations last month - and what appeared to be attempts to conceal evidence of that involvement - Peace's cautionary tales of violence and its terrible effects on ordinary people seem all the more timely.