Amsterdam is the Devil's Playground - it is the city where rogue detective Ronald van Hijn has found the body of Jake Colby; in fact it is the city where lots of bodies have been turning up, having died in unattractive circumstances, and Jake's is just the latest of them. Jake, though, has come from England, where he had been taken in from the street by Jon Reed, as van Hijn discovers when he has Reed, a music journalist turned web designer, come over to identify the body. On the mortuary slab Jake's body reveals not just the wounds of his death but also the scars of his long self-harming. Outside, in the narrow streets around Dam Square Reed discovers the members of the Revised Council of Blood, art students who believe in bringing art closer to the viewer in ways similar to the piercings they make of their bodies. He discovers piercers with an unhealthy interest in performance rather than results. Around those streets, too, are the neo-Nazis who want the reels of documentary film made and hidden in the laboratories of Auschwitz which are now back on the market. Reed, whose music reviewing could be so negative that it once sent a performer to his death, is only now coming terms with his need for a moral life, resisting it by ingesting as much weed as he can, and is forced to become a part detective himself. In Amsterdam he discovers the volunteers who are still archiving the horrors of the Nazis, and more who are intent on preventing the "treasures" of the Final Solution from becoming the rings of power of the neo-Nazis. They are those who are prepared to immerse themselves in the destructive element for the purposes of good. He discovers that those who present themselves as victims may be perpetrators, and that there are those who are prepared to injure themselves. THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND is massively gothic - unfortunately, like some of the gothic cathedrals, its foundations are weak. The police only investigate Jake's death, even though a series of women have been tortured with medieval instruments. Van Rijn is taken off the case because he shot a drug dealer: as if an armed police force is going to take any notice of a perp being shot (in the old West Germany, in some years every one shot by the police was an innocent bystander). When the police raid piercing establishments they never search the whole establishment, so once missing the deadly torture chamber (which must be of Tardis-like proportions given the chairs and what-have-you it contains). The worst mistake, though, is the big one: when Reed finally sees an extract from the Auschwitz film it shows a genital mutilation while an excited guard unzips his uniform trousers. If it had been Lee Child writing this, that is when the plot would have turned around, because Reed would have realised he was being played for a sucker. If Lee Child had been writing this, Reed might have gone on acting the idiot, but that would have been only to make the revelation and the reversal more surprising. No one, on either side of the war, wore uniform trousers with zip fastenings. It is an anachronism - the film is a fake. Oddly, in the near two years since THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND first appeared in hard-back, other things have been overtaken as well, and the main one is music: Reed and Suze, his new girlfriend, listen to all their music on CD, there is nary mention of an Ipod or MP3 player - in fact, there is not a lot that was not around in the '80s, let alone the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps other aspects of this book, too, have now appeared elsewhere - read Val McDiarmid's MERMAID'S SINGING if you want to read about medieval torture instruments being brought back to life, and I guess a lot of people will now be familiar with Alexander Masters STUART: A LIFE BACKWARDS, the true account of a derelict taken in from the street. James Sallis, who read this in manuscript, has described it as "altogether extraordinary". So perhaps I am like Jon Reed at the film show and have missed something important. Each of us must make our choice. |