I get the James Ellroy crossed with Stan Barstow schtick David Peace has been perfecting since the earliest days of The Red Riding Quartet. I also very much got the epic Lear-like grandeur of The Damned Utd. I’ve done my David Peace time, and I have enjoyed tracing the arc of his storytelling as each new book not only got darker but also leaner and more elliptical.

I imagined him obsessively chipping away at the same piece of marble trying to get to the pure essence of his stories. I enjoyed having to work a bit to keep up. However as with James Ellroy, there came a tipping-point where the sheer weight of these impressionistic trappings overtook the storytelling. Peace’s prose has got more elliptical, more internalised, more haunted and, bluntly, harder to follow.

Peace’s last book, Tokyo Year Zero, was the first in a new series set during the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in a starving chaotic criminal Tokyo. Perfect Peace fodder, but this time without the safety net of familiarity. On many occasions reading it I floundered, lost in the alien landscape of the setting and the style, but thankfully was still carried along by the verve and brio with which he pulled it off.  In the end I enjoyed his story of sexual obsession and a rapacious criminal underworld (not that unfamiliar then) but it was close.

Occupied City is the second entry into the Tokyo series and has as its jumping off point a real bank robbery during which 12 people die, having been forced to drink a lethal poison. Japanese detectives, criminals, the author himself, US and Russian soldiers and a journalist tell a piece of the story from their own perspective, some enlightening some confounding. So far so Rashomon, but having said Peace was all Ellroy and Barstow I think you can now say he has thrown in a whopping dollop of William Burroughs and TS Eliot. And Borges. And Tarkovsky. This is a crime novel, but not as we know it.

There is no doubting the hypnotic power of some of the book and that Peace has the talent to keep his myriad of plates spinning, but as with the style itself, enjoyment of Occupied City is partial and fragmented.

Has David Peace become an author it is easier to admire than to enjoy? As the owner of one of the few genuinely interesting writing talents around I hope not. I really, really hope not.

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