LEAVE THIS BOOK AT HOME

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 13th 2012

In our January/February issue, our literary editor Maggie Fergusson picked "People Who Eat Darkness" by Richard Lloyd Parry as her non-fiction book of 2011. Since the book has just come out in paperback from Vintage I picked it up before going on holiday. The bookseller had directed me to the true-crime section, which felt a bit voyeuristic, and when I opened the book at the airport, I thought this is a mistake, this is going to be ghoulish.

It was a mistake. “People Who Eat Darkness” is not a book to take on holiday. You won't talk to your friends or family, you won't visit any interesting sites, you won't even get much sleep. Not until you have reached the end. You will obsess about the subject, but no-one else at meal times will want to talk about a young woman who was murdered 12 years ago.

Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia editor of the Times, and his book follows the disappearance of Lucie Blackman, who was working as a hostess in Tokyo. But it's a book that packs in a large number of themes. Like the first series of "The Killing", it takes you deep into the lives of people whose world has been overturned by a terrible crime.

"People Who Eat Darkness" has tremendous twists, but its strength lies in its richness of detail. So many areas come to be important: from the Korean war and the "Bubble" economy to the discrete cultures of Tokyo nightlife, police investigations and the courts. At its heart, there's the collision between a Home Counties family, already torn apart by divorce, and an intensely foreign culture that’s 6,000 miles away. It's a great piece of feature writing that happens to run to 400 pages.

Maggie had picked one fiction and one non-fiction book from 2011. The fiction was Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child". Taking her non-fiction choice on a week’s holiday was a poor decision. It only lasted two days. I should have bought the Hollinghurst too.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life