Jedediah Berry’s first novel, The Manual of Detection, is an atmospheric and impressive debut. A comic, fantastical mystery in an ambiguous setting, the novel follows protagonist Charles Unwin, a file clerk in a massive but nameless detective agency (its motto: Never Sleeping.) Unwin loves his mundane, paper-pushing job, but he’s having a rather bad week.
He’s been promoted to the detective department. This would be good news, but his boss is missing, another of his superiors has turned up dead, and the only training he’s given as he sets out to solve these mysteries is the titular Manual of Detection, which he never gets around to reading. In trying to find his boss, Unwin is drawn into the world of a seedy travelling carnival whom he suspects stole a mummy from a museum. He also has to determine why November 12 never happened last year.
It’s the magical details like that that make the book what it is. Berry has a great skill for incorporating elements of the fantastic into a world that seems more or less real. For all its clever plot twists, The Manual of Detection‘s real triumph is in creating its setting. It’s remarkably vibrant for a story that takes place in the pouring rain in an unnamed city at an unspecified time. Sleeping and dreaming (and associated paraphernalia like alarm clocks) play an important part in the plot, and they also add to the hazy, dreamy quality of the entire book.
I rarely read mysteries, so at first I was unsure what to compare this to. There are elements of Chandler and Kafka, but for the most part it’s unlike anything else I’ve ever read, and that’s a good thing.
I realized that this book has a cinematic quality to it. Some books play like movies inside my head, and sometimes I can get some very good directors to work in there. The Manual of Detection worked almost like a Terry Gilliam film for me. The dreary setting, the sprawling bureaucracy and the hints at 1940s fashions all reminded me of Brazil. Unwin, like Sam Lowry, is an employee in a vast bureaucratic machine who suddenly finds his world turned upside down. In my intracranial cinema, this book was a film noir by Gilliam. And that’s a very good thing.
The thing about Gilliam’s movies, though, and about this book, is that atmosphere and style tend to be more important than plot. So while I was captivated by the descriptions in this book, some of the important details tended to fly over my head unnoticed. (This may be my fault as well as Berry’s, as I read half of the book in a noisy coffee shop where I had trouble focusing.) But I felt as though the mystery itself was secondary to the creation of a strange, magical city. For me, this book wasn’t so much about how November 12 was stolen, or who murdered the other detective, but about all the glorious images of phonograph archives and alarm clocks and carnival workers. When I finished The Manual, I didn’t even remember how all the little problems had been solved, but I felt like I had taken a trip to the mysterious city where the book takes place.
The writing style is brisk and detailed, and fits perfectly with the tone of the book. Early in the book, in a description of Unwin’s job, Berry writes: How superb, that diligence, that zeal! And how essential. For none but the loyal clerks were permitted to dispatch those files to their place of rest, the archives, where mysteries dwelled side by side in stark beauty, categorized and classified—mysteries parsed, their secret hearts laid bare by photographs, wiretaps and ciphers, fingerprints and depositions. At least this was how Unwin imagined the archives to be. He had never actually seen them, because only the underclerks were permitted to access those areas.
This passage, for me, captures the spirit of the book. Unwin’s enthusiasm for his dull job, the rigidity of the bureaucracy, the beauty and ugliness of the mysteries, the imagination needed to solve them: all here. Also here: proof that Berry is an excellent writer. The Manual of Detection was a quick, fun read, but I suspect that the dreamy feeling I got from reading it will last for a while.
