What do TV’s Breaking Bad, the video game Max Payne 3, and the latest Bond film Skyfall all have in common?
If you said ‘they all star balding men’, you’re pretty much right. They all feature main characters not only fighting villains but also the universal villainy of old age. Their time is ticking not only in the action sequences but also in terms of their literal body clock. They will either die from an MP 40 blast to the leg or a sudden blast of arthritis. Rage Against the Dying adds to this 2010s phenomenon of the passé protagonist. Becky Masterman’s novel is a work of classic noir; corrupt characters and institutions, cynical motives, main character left to act justly alone in an unjust world.
A thought which occasionally penetrates the narration of the protagonist, Brigid Quinn, is that as a retired FBI agent she is quite simply too old for this shit. She is forced to balance wild serial-killer hunting with a secure middle class life, being married to an ex-Jesuit priest with slightly more swag than Pope Francis. Quinn swerves dynamically through fast-paced passages of death, destruction and deceit, and it’s only now and again that you’re reminded she isn’t even a law enforcement agent, more accurately a languid pensioner with a penchant for rocks.
The novel takes place in the deserts of south-western U.S.A. This of course allows a scenery-pornographer’s admiration of a lush, tranquil landscape abounding with rare cacti to shoot through the layers and layers of thrilling entanglement.
Masterman’s style combats the somewhat annoying conventions of detective fiction. The forensics are realistic, examined corpses ground by nature to a rotting, decaying goo and therefore unrecognisable. DNA of everyone and everything is scattered unhelpfully around the crime scenes. Emotions are lost in a world of exceedingly systematic and perfunctory law enforcement. The novel reflects on the value of ‘closure’, as a grieving father stripped of his daughter wallows in the point of existence after learning precisely who to take revenge upon.
Rage Against the Dying is not the most articulate and evocative book. The husband is now a dreamy philosopher, never ceasing to put down a Wittgenstein, yet there is not much drilling into the quandaries of existence. However, Rage Against The Dying explores criminal psychology in a unique way, the police forced to turn into the sociopaths they chase. The book is also unrelenting in its action and excitement.