Girl On Fire
If this isn’t winning awards for Tony Parsons this year, it’s a crime.
As someone who reviews books in a vaguely professional way (most of the time I am provided with reading material in exchange for my comments), I see my fair share of bad prose. It is approximately equal in volume to the amount of bad prose I produce myself.
I was talking to Lauren, a pal of mine, about the ratio of bad books to good books. That as we march inexorably towards information infinity — where the world consists of nothing but bits and bytes, and the robots take their place in every throne — so the trash that is published continues to grow. It makes sense. The more information we crave, the more authors crawl from the woodwork to pedal their tawdry tales.
Which is why Girl On Fire was such a blessed relief. If this book isn’t the apotheosis of Tony Parson’s literary career, then he’s surely got to be readying for some kind of ‘best in class’ award.
Girl On Fire for me followed immediately on the heels of Tell Him He’s Dead, a shortie that’s currently free on Amazon. Both chart the chronicles of DC Max Wolfe, his scrapes and chicanery as he outwits increasingly cantankerous felons in a bleak rendition of London.
Having finished this latest book, I’m none the wiser as to the reason for the title. That’s irrelevant. Just like I tell all my girlfriends, it’s what’s inside that counts.
The story is a proper gripper. There’s a massive terrorist attack on a shopping centre and Wolfe is at the heart of the action from the get-go, having visited to buy his fast-maturing kid Scout a snappier rucksack.
It’s full on action from the very first page. The Met Police give a fair account of themselves and their handling of an increasingly volatile landscape where there are too many fanatics, and not enough boots on the ground to keep them under surveillance.
Parsons clearly has some very strong views about ways to keep his city safe. He also drops in plenty of smart references that feel a little navel-gazy (at one point he goes on about all these serial killers and whether or not their houses are still standing, which feels a bit extraneous and a lot ‘look at all the stuff I know’).
I won’t regurgitate the same stuff all the other reviewers will inevitably say about a book like this. There are more twists and turns than six laps of the Nurburgring, a lot of strong emotions as the body count mounts on both sides, and a lot of ideologies constructed and disassembled as Parsons gives a very fair account of how we’re all suffering in this cat and mouse game that never ceases to wreak havoc on destruction of what we used to call a conventional way of life.
Ironically, amid all the pandemonium as the force edges closer to solving this latest riddle, my lasting impression of this book is the tenderness of writing about Wolfe’s dog, Stan. It’s not even plain sailing for that mutt, that Jay Rayner of the canine kind who’s only revived from the jaws of death by the meaty aromas of Smithfield Market.
I had to check this was the same Parsons who wrote 1999’s Man and Boy. Of the now-departed NME. Columnist of The Sun, and a regular pundit on The Late Show. But is indeed one and the same. An incredibly versatile, clued-up (clearly not only book smart, but streetwise) narrator and borderline philosopher. A harbinger of our times.
You should read Girl On Fire. It is the first book in years that is, as hammy reviewers might say, unputdownable.
It has as much in common with most books published these days as the title of this book to the work inside.
Girl On Fire is stupidly cheap at just £6 on Amazon right now.
