“I like detecting,” Gertrude Stein once wrote. “There are so many things to detect, why did somebody say what they said, why did somebody cut out a paragraph …” If, in some circles, crime fiction is still associated with penny dreadfuls and mass-market mediocrity, Stein represents a counter-tradition – one that includes Jorge Luis Borges and William S Burroughs, Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon – of highbrow and formally adventurous writers who have bent sinister, seeing this residually pulp genre as an ally in the war against a bland literary mainstream.
The Fountain in the Forest is a rich, riveting example of this alternative lineage. It begins with the discovery of a nose-less body hanging in a Covent Garden theatre. The chief suspect is an old pal of detective Rex King who, in trying to track him down, revisits half-forgotten episodes from British and European social history, among them 1985’s “battle of the beanfield”, in which more than 1,300 police officers prevented new age travellers from setting up a free festival near Stonehenge. Another section of the book follows English teenager JJ as he travels to the south of France and happens upon a group of artists, hippies and anarchists.
Set in the 90 days between the end of the miners’ strike and the beanfield battle, White’s novel vividly reanimates this lost interregnum – a year before the big bang, which ushered in the deregulation of financial markets and imperial Thatcherism – as a period both of defeat and of dreams, of innocence and of dark enlightenment. Moving forward in time, there are references to the derailing of the Stalker inquiry, which had been investigating whether British forces had a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland; to undercover police infiltrating groups campaigning against the building of the Newbury bypass; to the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad targeting anti-racist groups supporting the family of Stephen Lawrence. This is David Peace territory: history as secretly scripted, as occult malevolence.
White’s innovation is to fuse his revisionist narrative with techniques associated with Oulipo, the group of writers and mathematicians, including Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, who produced work according to sometimes baffling rules and constraints (Perec’s novel A Void featured not a single “e”). White forces himself to use all the words that comprise answers to the Guardian’s Quick Crossword from March to April 1985 (“Aral”, “black pudding”, “sabre-rattler”, “Spike Milligan” ...). They appear in bold type and are deployed sometimes dextrously and sometimes clunkily – a policeman lashes out at Rex “like a horse with colic”. The words (Mondale, Ulster, Orwell, Derby Day) emerge as the collective lexical unconscious of the period, exude the strange poetry of the Shipping Forecast, and – mandated as they are – invite comparison with the kind of planted evidence that plays a key role in the novel.
Equally arresting are the chapter names (“Pissenlit”, “Mandragore”), which are taken from the French revolutionary rural calendar. Post-1789, the essayist Sylvain Maréchal and others developed a radical form of timekeeping that involved the creation of 10-day weeks and days named after, say, rhubarb or goats. This exercise in rupture and regeneration inspires many of JJ’s fellow idealists. An explanation of the calendar by the scholar Sanja Perovic (“the story of the Republican calendar restores to life the assumptions, hopes and blind spots about the construction of value and meaning that remain with us today”) is so crucial to a full understanding of White’s project that in his preface he urges readers to check out her book on the topic.
More insecure writers would have laboured to show off their erudition and ended up producing drily conceptual fare. White is always convivial company, making ostensibly abstruse speculations – such as the connection between the biblical lyrics of reggae records and the sense of time inherent in dolomitic limestone cliffs – seem common sense. He has pleasing riffs on the semiotics of black Fred Perry shirts, and how the customer base of Pizza Express has evolved over recent decades. The prose is more pulpy and playful than procedural: some cops can take apart a case “with the avidity of safari park baboons on a banana-flavoured BMW”. Rex is as engaging a ladies’ man as Neil Pearson’s Tony Clark in the much-missed 90s TV series Between the Lines.
White is a restless, endlessly curious, somewhat centrifugal writer. His books include Balkan travelogues and collaborations with visual artists such as Gustav Metzger and Jane and Louise Wilson. They are characterised by stylistic innovation, a feeling for place, a love of rogues and rebels. The Fountain in the Forest is no different. It’s also the opening salvo in a trilogy. I’m already awaiting the next.
• The Fountain in the Forest is published by Faber. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99..
