The ObserverCrime fictionReviewIf only this taut Australian thriller wasn't quite so grim, writes Edmund GordonTruth might seem, at first, a more promising title for a treatise on epistemology than a hardboiled detective story, so grand is the project that it appears to map out. Yet by the end of Peter Temple's new novel the title feels almost elegiac. The book's major theme is corruption, personal and political. Temple puts old-fashioned abstract values into conflict with a bleak vision of modern reality, and the result is consistently arresting.
The central narrative is tautly constructed and compulsively paced. In a summer of devastating forest fires in Australia, Inspector Stephen Villani, head of the Victoria homicide squad, has a spate of new killings to contend with. A woman has been found in a luxury apartment block with her neck broken. Her clothes and personal effects have been taken, there is little hope of identifying her, and the apartment's residents are proving impossible to trace. Meanwhile, the mutilated bodies of three drug dealers have been discovered in an abandoned warehouse across the city. Villani's attempts to uncover the facts behind these crimes are obstructed from almost every angle: the owner of the apartment block has many influential friends, and is keen to preserve the reputation of his investment; politicians, senior police officers and figures in the media all throw their weight against the investigation, while Villani's own subordinates undermine him at every turn.
Villani himself is a severely flawed and indelibly compromised hero: an adulterous husband and an inadequate, guilt-ridden father and son, harrowed by his experiences in the police force, it emerges that he once helped another officer to disguise the fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect as an act of self-defence. When he begins to realise that one of his colleagues might be among the people responsible for the crimes he's investigating, it is far from clear whether his damaged conscience will prevail over his instinct for self-preservation.
Temple has long been regarded as one of Australia's most accomplished crime writers, but this is only the second of his nine novels (after the widely acclaimed bestseller The Broken Shore, which features Villani as a minor character) to be published in Britain. A far more literary writer than most of his peers, he eschews the staccato prose rhythms that typify the genre, opting instead for long sentences that do their work over several clauses, blooming and shrinking, and achieving strange, impressionistic effects. His dialogue is entirely distinctive, full of the mangled poetry and beautiful solecisms of ordinary speech. His images can catch in the mind like things glimpsed under lightning. A dead girl's flesh is the colour "of earliest dawn". Autumn leaves move through the air "like broken water, yellow and brown and blood".
But despite these great accomplishments, the novel prevents itself from escaping the pigeonhole of genre fiction because of its unrelenting ugliness of vision. Nightmarish murders evidently do occur daily, but accepting the reality of a world in which everybody is corrupted by power and damaged by violence, in which savagery has become a monotony, in which a government minister, talking to a near-stranger, can describe murdered women as "sluts… dogshit on the shoes of society", involves a prolonged banishment of disbelief.
The darkness that pervades the novel would be a good deal more effective if it had a little more light to dispel. JM Coetzee's Disgrace (which Temple's publishers ambitiously compare Truth to) contains one scene of horrifying violence; it would be inestimably less powerful if it was just one among several. For all Temple's mastery of style, for all his clarity of thought and subtlety of characterisation, in the end his new novel lacks that essential quality, the impression of truth.
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