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RATING: |
Date of Release: December 2002 |
Publisher: Penguin Books |
Review Source: |
Handsome Philip Dryden is a newspaper reporter turned detective. His slothful sidekick Humph is a triumph of a creation. Taciturn in his own language, he lives in a fog of foreign language tapes inside his shoddy cab in which the meter always reads £2.95.
The Water Clock is an extraordinarily visual work and easy to imagine transferring to movie or television. The brooding presence of the Fens, the elemental forces of nature, set against the drama of individual lives reminds the reader of Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath.
One of the finest comic scenes has police in full riot gear ludicrously tiptoeing in tortoise formation towards a suspect’s home, observed with laconic interest by Dryden from the window seat of his favorite Chinese restaurant.
The narrative is fast-paced, breathlessly so at times, as Dryden's investigation pulls him back through time to a crime committed in 1966.
Kelly’s account of the daily lives of local newspaper reporters is most convincing, even if their diet of news stories is often more humdrum. This has all the style and grace of a serious novel, the fun of a comic novel and the charge of a topnotch thriller.
