When the two sevens clash

David Peace's Nineteen seventy-seven as "occult history"

Dean Lockwood

pp. 49-65

in: Siân Adiseshiah, Rupert Hildyard (eds), Twenty-first century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon David Peace's crime writing, specifically the sequence known as the Red Riding Quartet, four novels published between 1999 and 2002 which deal with police and press investigations of murders and sex crimes in the North of England in the period from 1974 to 1983. I want to reflect upon Peace's claim that these books constitute an "occult history" of the North. I explore this claim through discussion of one of the novels in particular, Nineteen Seventy-Seven. This novel is the part of the quartet that was dropped — apparently for economic reasons, but it is notable that it is also the bleakest of the books — for Channel 4's 2009 television adaptations, broadcast as "The Red Riding Trilogy". Peace has said that the novel is his favourite of the quartet, which is a judgement I share, and for this reason was both relieved and disappointed that it was not filmed (cited in Phelan, 2009). It is in Nineteen Seventy-Seven that the "occult" in "occult history" unfolds most fully. I will argue that Peace's occult workings are of great importance in addressing social and cultural developments in our increasingly digitalised and 'semiocapitalist" life in the twenty-first century. In my final section I will bring to bear some Deleuzian concepts to better frame Peace's significance and "occult" modus operandi.