Journeys in the Dead Season, Pan Macmillan 2005
The story so far...
A prisoner is on remand in Durham high security jail for what turns out
to be a series of attacks on young girls across Leicestershire,
culminating in abduction, rape and murder.
In the autumn of 1922, Captain Crowe is on a journey across
Leicestershire. He intends to visit his old comrades from the War and
finish his book on horticulture.
The prisoner is reading a copy of Crowe's book, Perambulations of a
Soldier: Autumn to Winter. Crowe's retelling of his odyssey in his
letters, their subsequent appearance within Perambulations and the
prisoner's interpretation of them, creates a macabre fusion of past and
present, where fact and fiction, truth and reality begin to merge and
coalesce...
Juxtaposing the experiences of a shellshock victim in the early 1920s
with the recollections of an alleged child-murderer in the present day,
Journeys in the Dead Season is a masterpiece of psychological complexity
and subtlety. In the vein of writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Beryl
Bainbridge, this is a novel that plays with voice, place and time to
create an enthralling narrative that is both metaphysically haunting and
deeply compelling.
(c) Spencer Jordan Last updated 4th July 2008
