Obsession and obfuscation

The target audience for David Peace’s new novel appears almost defiantly niche. Certainly, any readers in the embarrassing position of not being entirely up to speed on the life and works of the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) seem destined — even intended — to find Patient X a less than alluring combination of the tediously baffling and the bafflingly tedious.

Peace’s fact-based fiction has always demanded a fair amount of patience and concentration, with obsession serving as both his subject matter and his method. Yet in novels such as GB84 (about the miners’ strike) and The Damned United (about that other Yorkshire cataclysm, Brian Clough’s time at Leeds), the hammering repetitions and fragmented narratives had enough hypnotic effectiveness to communicate the books’ obsessions to the reader. Here, by contrast, the 12 sometimes-overlapping, sometimes-discrete chapters are often so wilfully alienating as to make the result feel less like a novel and more like an increasingly punishing assault course.