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Gone for a Burton The Face Phil Whitaker 246 pp, Atlantic Books The Face is Phil Whitaker's third novel. When hes not writing, he works as a GP and forensic medical examiner. It shows. The book is appalling in its detail, steady in its gaze, and deeply penetrating in its insight into flesh and blood. Whitaker's first novel, Eclipse of the Sun (1997), was well crafted and intriguing. His second, Triangulation (1999), was well crafted and charming.
The Face is a major advance on these two: its well-crafted and utterly sickening. This is a recommendation. Ray Arthur is a retired police detective. Hes dead: killed in a car crash involving no other vehicles that may have been accidental or may have been suicide.
But what reason would someone like Ray, a good cop and a loving father and grandfather, have to do himself in? The book is narrated alternately by Zo&# 235; , Rays daughter, and Declan, a former police artist and friend of Rays, who worked with him in Nottingham back in the early 1970 s on a particularly horrific case of sexual assault on a young girl. The narrative is interspersed with transcripts from the inquest into Rays death. These three accounts of Rays life and death represent a considerable technical accomplishment. Whitaker achieved a similar narrative complexity in Triangulation.
Sometimes one wonders if the necessary consecutive thinking, the logic and the relentless pursuit of truth that characterise the scientific mindset are better suited to the composition of fiction than the tiresome self-obsessions of the literary. During the course of the novel Declans addresses to the reader become increasingly disturbing and poetic Out of my ambit your body has no mass, you are free of gravity, at the mercy of the wind. Gusts blow you this way and that. You become disorientated, lose your sense of time and place. Zo&# 235; , meanwhile, is at first merely inquisitive and then concerned and alarmed as she discovers strange truths about her father, and her own marriage begins to falter.
And all the time, in the background, the inquest is grinding on, marshalling the relevant facts: The incident occurred at approximately two thirty in the afternoon of October twenty third. It was raining... visibility was fair. There was one vehicle involved, a blue Volkswagon Polo 1. 3 LS. As in his other novels, Whitaker is attempting to resurrect the past: in this instance, and in particular, a dreary 1970 s Nottingham. He makes it look pathetically easy, simply peeling back the present to reveal whats underneath.
This is how he recreates a typical 1970 s pub: Try to ease yourself back some thirty years The bare floorboards will be the same, but the taps behind the bar have become pump handles. Instead of the panoply of lagers and bitters they stock only Shipstones, Burton Ale and Guinness. The air is grey with cigarette smoke, and any music has become nothing more than the muttering of voices, punctuated by the clunk of the cash drawer sliding shut beneath the till. And thats it. Theyre broad, bold brushstrokes, but they achieve the desired effect. It takes some writers whole novels to convince you that they have any genuine sense of the past.
Whitaker saves his energies for plots. He should probably be writing screenplays. To say much more about The Face would be to begin to unravel the skein. Suffice it to say that there is a terrible miscarriage of justice, and that there are things that flesh and blood cannot bear. &# 183; Ian Sansom is the author of The Truth About Babies (Granta)
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