Box Nine
Jack O'Connell
Pan pbk, 338 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
Bangkok Park is one of those parts of the city that not even the toughest of local police will venture into without a well-stocked gun cabinet. The drug capital of Quinsigamond, ruled over by the enigmatic Cortez from a monumental building that houses both his fashionable night-club (with walls that run with fake blood) and penthouse home. Trade is dominated by the traditional pharmaceuticals until into this urban sprawl someone injects a whole new experience in chemical highs - Lingo, a designer compound that speeds up the language capacity to an insect buzz before its inevitably violent side-effects.
The city is sufficiently worried by the new stuff on the streets to pick a special police task force, including a hook-up between Leonore Thomas, a female cop with a fatal attraction for guns and occasional samples of local trade, and the brilliant biochemist Freddie Woo. And all the while, her timid postman brother Ike is finding out more about the Lingo supply lines than is healthy - through the mysterious Box Nine.
Box Nine is Jack O'Connell's debut novel, with many of the strengths and weaknesses that implies. Implications abound both for and against a futuristic setting in all this that resolves itself as a unexpected tension at the heart of the book. This is almost Chandler or Hammett through the distorting fairground mirror-shades of cyberpunk. Against that however, O'Connell seems on occasion to be struggling in the 'profound' discussions between, particularly, Woo and Thomas, passages that drag the narrative for no clear reason. Similarly, Leonore's internal monologue just at the climax is horrendously mistimed, undercutting any suspense the author has managed to forge.
Most disconcerting of all, his prose is unusually struck entirely in the present tense, which has a dislocating effect on the reader that both works for an inscrutable atmosphere, while simultaneously having a distancing effect on the reader.
The book is at its best when it shies away from the strictures of O'Connell's plot and strays into potentially stronger, stranger areas in the relationships between characters. If that between Leonore and Woo is formulaic, then those involving the cop and her timorous brother, or indeed Ike and his domineering Post Office supervisor Eva seem to hide dark, unspoken stresses and frustrations that provide for many of the best passages.
The ultimate resolution to all this is, unfortunately, an altogether too conventional one, with a shoot-out and the inevitable revelations of true motives and identities - none of which come as any surprise. It's a shame and perhaps another indication that what O'Connell really needs are the services of a good editor to pull over 300 pages back to a tighter, more satisfying 250. Even so, his next - Wireless - should make intriguing reading.