Stevan Alcock - Blood Relatives

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good book - in the end

In the end I thought this was a good book, although I found the first half a struggle.

Set in Leeds between July 1975, when Peter Sutcliffe ("The Yorkshire Ripper") killed his first victim and January 1981 when he was arrested, this is the coming-of-age story of the narrator, Rick.  He is a delivery lad on a soft-drinks van: poorly educated, disaffected, rebellious and gay.  The story is told in episodes, each at a time of Sutcliffe's attacks, and headed with the name and date of the victim and narrated in a sort of Leeds dialect.

By the end I was glad to have read this; the second half has decently developed characters, a story which has gathered enough momentum to grip and a sense of time and place which has finally become convincing and natural.  There is a very good sense of how Sutcliffe's murders came to pervade people's and also of the attitudes of people toward gays and the political currents of the time.

Frankly, though, I found the first half of this book tough going.  If I hadn't received a free ARC via Netgally and felt obliged to persist I might well have given up.  In the end I was glad I had stuck with it, but the setting of the scene and time is pretty clunky, I found the use of Sutliffe's victims to mark the chapters in very questionable taste because it wasn't at all clear whether they were anything other than just chapter markers, and the narrative voice didn't really convince me.

The problem with Rick's voice persisted throughout the book.  I like the use of dialect, and it helped generate a sense of place and character, but it seemed very inconsistent to me.  In the same paragraph, for example, Rick says both "t'insect" and "the insect," he uses "misen" for myself but "my" rather than "me" and so on.  I spent my youth with a similar dialect and this didn't quite ring true to me.  Nor did Rick's very poetic use of imagery, simile and so on.  He hated school, left early and actually says at one point "Why do folk bother wi' poetry?" and yet he says things like "Gordon smiled frugally," or "Mistrust hung between them like a pane of glass onto which each exhaled icily."  Both excellent, evocative sentences – but from Rick?  Hmm.

I don't want to carp too much.  It's a good book in the end with important things to say and anyone who lived through those times will recognise the well-drawn attitudes and characters of the period.  If you can get on with the first half of the book and can live with the inconsistencies in the narrative voice, you'll enjoy this and I can recommend it.