Publisher: Waggledance Press; 1 edition (30 Oct. 2016)
ISBN-13: 978-0956966827
The blurb to this book tells the reader that everything in
this story is fake, even the name of the main character – it talks about being
on the run, being washed up, doing one last job. Blurbs are there to get you to
pick up the book, to think, yeah, that sounds like a decent thriller; to make
you put your hand in your pocket and dig out the cash. The cover is dark.
Bleak. You think you know what you’re getting. You think this is going to be straightforward
genre fiction.
But is it? Is this really just a standard crime thriller,
read it once, forget it? I don’t think so. I think it’s far, far subtler than
the blurb would lead you to believe. True, it’s full of ‘stuff’ happening. Scene
after scene winds up the tension ready for the explosive and shocking finale
which incidentally, is foreshadowed brilliantly halfway through novel. It’s not
so much what happens at that point, but what John, the narrator, says in
one of his occasional soliloquies that punctuate the action where he talks about the
lack of imagination he sees in the ‘easy-going criminals’ who make up his
circle. The emptiness of their thought processes means they cannot see how
their actions are going to have real, devastating and horrifying consequences
that are beyond their wildest imaginings – the point being that they are
incapable of having those imaginings in the first place. There are disasters,
tragedies, waiting to happen, and they’ll never see them coming until it’s too
late. They simply don’t think.
John, on the other hand is a thinker. He tries
to switch his thinking off, along with his emotions, but that high-functioning brain
of his is there in the background all the time, even when he’s numbing it with
drink or the excessive workouts with which he abuses his body in his search for
oblivion. His life is a downward spiral. He can see this. He has imagination.
But even he can’t see the ending.
PJ Walters has produced a hilariously self-deprecating
biography for the purposes of this publication. In it, he says: PJ Walters is
an academic and writer with the most lacklustre CV in modern British history.
He once won an Arts Council award for his writing, but it’s now worn off. The
best thing that can be said about him is that he owns a nice hat. Yes, the hat
is very nice. I’ve seen photos. But Walters is far more than an academic with a
hat. Much of ‘Contracts’ is filmic, much of it very noir, and it’s clear that
this is an area which Walters understands intimately. Each scene is perfectly
choreographed – it’s ready to be filmed. This is the book of the film that is
yet to be made. Walters directs it with exemplary skill, but he bypasses the
need for the expense of production – he projects the story directly into his
readers’ brains. The language he uses is an object lesson in invisible
excellence. You stop noticing you’re reading at all. That’s how it should be.
It’s not all darkness. There is some humour, though it’s
pretty bleak. I particularly enjoyed the excruciating journey John takes when
Euan is driving for a change, and he has his CD on auto-play, continually
repeating a mind-numbing thumping beat at unbearably high volume. We’ve all had
vehicles like that drive past us – it makes a change to be inside one, but this
is precisely what this book does so well. Walters takes us inside every aspect
of the underworld that his anti-hero inhabits.
The novel is called ‘Contracts’, and it’s a great title,
multi-layered, many possible interpretations, but it’s left to the reader to
decide precisely what they think it means, beyond the obvious.
So it’s a thriller, yes, and a very good one at that. But it
also crosses over into literary fiction because it never spoonfeeds the reader,
it never explains. This is not airport fiction. This is a thought provoking and
disturbing novel that will get under the reader’s skin in a way which many
throwaway thrillers can only dream about, if they have the imagination. But
that’s just the point. They don’t.
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