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Denise Mina is an astute writer
Book Review
By Derryll White
Mina, Denise (2013). The Red Road.
I am interested in writers from other countries because I find they often feature their nation and city as primary characters. This seems to be particularly true in the mystery/suspense genre. Denise Mina lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and is reported to do for that city what Ian Rankin did for Edinburgh – move it onto the international stage.
Mina is an astute writer. She sets a raw, poor care home scene framing a 14-year-old prostitute, then infuses it with the brilliant memory (for most readers) of Princess Diana dying in a tunnel in France. I immediately flash to loneliness, beauty, waste, intrigue, AIDS, land mines. And Mina has me, appreciative and attentive to what she will next bring to the page.
Mina writes of Glasgow as a hard city – crime, drugs, paedophiles, prostitutes. The story follows Rose, a young woman with no love in her life – ever. Rose was used, abused and exploited. Denise Mina takes common everyday scenes and inserts shocking images. The effect is to wake the reader up to a world to easy to ignore, to mask.
Then there are the class differences. The British Isles always has that awareness, in every story written, that there are those who are clearly entitled, and those with naught. I know that this disparity exists in North America as well, but our writers do not seem as sensitized. I like Mina’s starkness; her sense of how so many came from nothing and struggle toward small successes.
‘The Red Road’ was the first of Denise Mina’s works that I have read, but I will read more.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
GLASGOW – Now she was dead. Julius saw the footage of people sobbing at the gates of Kensington Palace, strangers clutching one another, lucky not to live in cynical Glasgow, a city exhausted of sorrow.
DEMOLITION – Early in her career Morrow had policed the crowd when the high flats in the Gorbals were demolished. The officers had to stand with their backs to the show, watching the crowd for three or so hours…. It was a modern public hanging. They were there to see something bigger than them die, to participate in an irreversible act of destruction.
CLASS – Morrow saw Mina then as the Glasgow princess that she was. Morrow had been at school on the south side, with boys who dreamed of girls like Mina but settled for girls like her.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
