BOOK | FICTION | LITERARY
THE DISTANT SOUND OF VIOLENCE
JASON GREENSIDES
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Do we ever escape the decisions we make when we’re fifteen?
Amazon Book Description
Nathan Dawes, the loser from school, an outsider, street philosopher and member of The Grove Runners gang, needs Ryan’s help to get Stephanie to fall for him. When Ryan’s lawnmower is stolen, Nathan sees this as his chance to enlist Ryan in his plan.
Although Ryan knows becoming friends with Nathan could lead to trouble, he reluctantly agrees to help.
Stephanie wants nothing to do with either of them. Besides, she’s more interested in the one guy in the world she really shouldn’t be.
As Nathan continues his pursuit of Stephanie, and Ryan gets mixed up with The Grove Runners, soon events overtake them all, haunting their lives for years to come.
Part coming of age, part mystery story, The Distant Sound of Violence is a heartbreaking tale of bad decisions and love gone wrong. It’s about choices that lead to violence, loss and tragedy.
THE DISTANT SOUND OF VIOLENCE by Jason Greensides is a hauntingly atmospheric tour de force with its stark and captivating descriptions of English life during the Nineties and beyond set in, on, and around the mean streets of London, its fully-fleshed characters as flawed and true-to-life as any character on a page can be, and its ringing dialogue that is at times achingly smart, witty, and/or sad, and that is always cut with just the right amount of a pleasingly rhythmic patios.
Not to say that I didn’t have some quibbles with this masterwork. At over 500 pages, I thought the narrator interjecting his personal story from time to time, while interesting enough to some extent, didn’t add enough value to the overall arc and purpose of the story to merit the lengthy interjections. Specifically, there is one part of the book where the narrator again interjects himself and becomes oddly obsessive in trying to track down and map out the locations of mysterious graffiti tags left by Nathan Dawes, our also oddly obsessive (but oddly obsessive with clear purpose) protagonist; where, in the end, all the time and effort spent in the narrator’s mapping of the tags served no revealing purpose that I can tell except to further highlight something that we already knew — that our protagonist is oddly obsessive to a life-wrecking fault.
But again, these are mere quibbles and ones not nearly severe enough to lower this grateful reader’s overall five-star ranking of this highly intriguing and highly recommended epic of a read.