Customer Reviews

Hinterland

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This book is a dark gem.

Hinterland charts the descent of a young journalist, Dave, into drug-fuelled madness - or his journey toward disturbing nocturnal truths about the world. It depends on your point of view.

David Barnett shares a first name and a profession with his fictional protagonist, and I'd like to think, for the sake of Mr Barnett's health and sanity, that this novel isn't strictly autobiographical.

Fictional reporter Dave is a hot-shot on his local paper; a fun-loving guy with loyal mates and a tangled but exhilarating love life. Then he has a series of scoops with weird stories such as the Beast of Shotmoor and the Curse of the Crying Boy. And we begin to learn that Dave's life and his apparently mundane English town possess grim secrets.

What exactly is the nature of the nightclub Arcadia, which seems to exist in a time-warp on the edge of town - in the Hinterland of the title? Who is the man with the violin case? Who is the Alpha Geek? As the mysteries pile up, Dave becomes an increasingly harried and deranged figure.

Barnett handles the juxtaposition of the strange and the ordinary with extraordinary skill. His treatment of the Island of Lost Women is a good example. Two women - twins - grow up as feral children on an island in the middle of a lake in a municipal park; which sounds implausible as I've put it. But Barnett not only makes it heartbreakingly possible, he also manages to weave it superbly into the novel's main themes of alienation and the unpalatable "truths" that fester behind the closed curtains of suburbia.

Like many good books, Hinterland is open to a number of interpretations. It can be read as a straightforward X-files-style mystery; though it is much more than that. It can be read as a clever description of insanity, related from the viewpoint of an insane mind. Or should it be seen as a castigation of the cultural blindness of our technological, pleasure-driven society? An epigraph for the novel could taken from Vladimir's monologue in Beckett's Waiting for Godot: "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?" Or maybe the novel is a metaphor for artistic revelation and the alienation of the artist.

However this book is interpreted, it deserves to be read. Oh, and where can I buy a bottle of the Red Mist that the characters keep drinking...?