Review: Luther: The Calling (spoilery version)

[hestia8]

This ticks all the boxes. ALL OF THEM.

Self-indulgent note: JUSTIN IS IN IT. Oh, be still my beating heart. Only briefly, but considering when I found out this book was a prequel my first thought was ‘oh, no Justin then :(‘, I basically did a little jump for joy when he appeared.

(it does not quite explain why Justin is such a stalker that he applied to work with John in writing three times a week for nine months, but you can’t have everything, and maybe this will be explored in a later book)

Actual notes that will be of use to other people:

It deals with the Henry Madsen case. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get this, because apparently I had forgotten Henry Madsen’s name. And it goes into more detail than you probably ever wanted to know about the Madsen case.

(I am not kidding about the wanting to throw up, not kidding at all)

The case is a Luther case: horrific, violent, really, really the kind of thing that makes you wonder where Neil Cross gets this stuff from, and full of the dregs of humanity.

Being a woman is, of course, the most dangerous thing you can be (sigh). Being a pregnant woman even more so. Yes, it’s that bad. In fact, it’s probably worse than you’re thinking. Think of how scary series 2 was. There you go.

Everyone appears except Alice (obviously, although I was looking out for some mention of a redhead in the background – if there was one, I missed it). Teller is brilliant (I really need to know what happened to Teller after series 1, people), Zoe is so human (tired, frustrated, caught between being happy with Mark and guilty about John), Justin is true to character (i.e. lovely and noble and respectful and so on) Schenk is recognisably Schenk (and has a wife called Avril), Mark is…Mark (less annoying than I found him in s1 but that could be with the hindsight of s2), Benny is in it! And is yay!, and Ian Reed is there. Of course.

And this is what is interesting about Ian Reed: he gets involved with some guy, needing a favour (and because it’s Luther, this whole thing started simple and got very very messy), and because of that favour, he owes it to this guy to get involved with that thief dude from 105.

(the episode with the diamonds)

I don’t know what other people thought after 105 (tell me, please, talk to me about this book and series forever), about how Ian got involved with the diamond thieving, but after 105/106, I thought that Ian was dirty. He was on the take. I thought it was simple. I thought he was dodgy, and he got away with it because he travelled in the slipstream of Luther’s iffy doings, which was how he’d managed to get away with it.

Boom, says the book, gotcha. He was trying to help John. If John wasn’t so willing to cross the line to get stuff done, Ian wouldn’t have needed to go to this guy. He wouldn’t have made the deal.

It’s funny how you can forget that nothing in Luther is simple.

(this is why the book should be considered canon – not that I expect anyone to argue against it – but it makes everything so much more open and intricate)

And of course, there is John.

Luther’s skull bursts open like an egg sac. Spiders crawl out.

I find it difficult to put into words how I feel about John Luther. Possibly part of it is that I’ve been watching programmes purely because Idris Elba is in them since I saw Ultraviolet (I didn’t see it when it was on, but watched it a few years later), and a large part of how compelling John is to watch is Idris Elba.

With John, it’s easy to forget parts of his character, I’ve found. Or rather, it’s difficult to keep everything about him in mind at the same time. Like the Bowie thing (present) and the books thing (present) and the willingness to beat someone up for information (very present). Maybe I’m too used to TV characters being complex but not too complex (in the media I watch – you may disagree but you may also watch other shows) that while I can accept John Luther as ‘complicated’, it takes me a while to remember why.

(I think there is something interesting to be written about John and how his appearance is a help and a hindrance, but I don’t know when I’m going to get round to it)

This book is so good as a Luther fan because you get backstory, and God knows if there’s one thing I love, it’s backstory. You get John’s backstory, or a large chunk of it. He has a degree in English. He and Zoe met at university (the description of what John was like at university is my current favourite thing). They agreed that they didn’t want children, etc (I haven’t spoiled all the character details here, I promise). And all of the detail in the book adds up to why John is so tired of everything, why he acts the way he does, why he lets Alice play her games and doesn’t just get her arrested when she starts threatening people, and why Ian’s betrayals come as such a shock.

John has a lot of influence. Almost more than Teller, for all that’s she’s head of his department. He’s a good hook for the media, and he’s willing, sometimes, to put himself out there to be fixated upon (he could have stopped Alice much earlier). He has influence that he doesn’t want, which you see with Alice throughout series 1, and that soldier dude in 102 (and the guy in 103, maybe), and it’s developed in this book with Henry Madsen.

There is a way to stop all this: he could leave the police force.

John is, much like Sarah Lund (will anyone reading this get that reference?), not going anywhere (Forbrydelsen, people). He’s not going to leave the police, whether he says it in this book or series 1 or series 2. At one point, as he says to Zoe, he tries to get himself fired. It doesn’t take. He makes other, half-hearted attempts to walk away, the way he does in the show, but John Luther really isn’t made for any other life (despite the English degree and the postgrad qualification*). Really, what else is he going to do?

(go on the run with Alice is the obvious answer there, I suppose, but when did Luther ever do the obvious?)

There are two ways that reading the book of a show can go. Recently I read some of Sophie Hannah’s novels after watching Case Sensitive. I think I made it through three (of seven) before giving up, because I found the characters’ internal monologues so fucking self-obsessive I couldn’t believe they got any work done. I found the characters on TV to be unsure, and human, and prone to saying the wrong thing, but still competent and interesting. I found the characters in the books to be whiny and navel-gazing and so unsure of everything it was a wonder they made it out of the door in the morning.

Admittedly it’s not a direct comparison (see note in the non-spoilery version about books to tv), but with this, the characters were not only recognisably the ones from the show, but seeing them this way made them make sense. The characters in Sophie Hannah’s novels are neurotic, but don’t seem to get that this can be a problem and there are things they can get help for. The [police] characters in Luther are aware that, especially in the unit they work in, they have problems and that after a while everything starts to look like it’s covered in blood, but they choose to disregard that and get on with the job. At the end of the day, no-one’s really happy, but it’s less frustrating to read.

I found the book easier to read when it was focusing on the investigation(s) going on and not the bits with Henry Madsen doing the things that made the search for him such a big deal. I was prepared for this going in – a) it was Luther and b) tigertrapped had warned me, but it was still pretty gruesome.

That was basically the only thing I could have done without (and who the violence was focused on), which is exactly the way I am with the series. On the whole, as I said right at the top, this book is everything a Luther fan could want from a prequel (would it work for someone unfamiliar with Luther? It would probably depend on how strong a stomach they have).

So, in conclusion: read this book. Then come and talk to me about it.

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*mentioned in the book without specifics – has he ever mentioned it in the show?

(ps: when I have had time to digest I will probably have thoughts about how the events of this book relate to Alice, and what Luther gets out of their relationship)