Book Review: The Manual of Detection

It may be a little bit late in the season to add to the summer reading list, but if you can squeeze Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection in as a late entry, I recommend it. This very enjoyable, exceptionally well-written book is unlike anything I’ve read recently. A post-modern, surrealist, alternate-reality detective novel, The Manual of Detection is an unlikely, but successful, combination of Raymond Chandler, Haruki Murakami and Franz Kafka (with perhaps a bit of Norton Juster thrown in as well).

The story follows events in the life of Charles Unwin, our reluctant protagonist, a clerk who works in the powerful and mysterious “Agency,” where the hierarchy consists of watchers, detectives, clerks, and underclerks. Unwin works for the city’s most famous detective, chronicling the cases of Detective Sivart, a man he’s never met (people within the Agency’s hierarchy are forbidden from speaking directly with those not on their own levels). When Sivart goes missing, Unwin is unexpectedly promoted, though he really wants nothing more than to avoid detective work and return to his routine life as a clerk. Unwin’s bizarre adventures involve a series of threatening encounters with humorous and sinister villains, game-changing revelations of high-level conspiracies, and duplicitous femme fatales. Several important scenes are played out within Unwin’s own meticulous, lucid dreams.

It’s clear from the beginning that this novel is going someplace different. The alternate-reality setting (the year is never mentioned) is a city populated by people who drive steam trucks, use manual typewriters and wake to wind-up alarm clocks. A third of the way through, things go from odd to weird to downright surreal, but by the end, everything makes sense, the pieces of a puzzle fit together perfectly. Early in The Manual—a title which also refers to the book-within-the-book, an instruction guide given to Unwin to train him for his new job—we learn about the importance of distinguishing details from clues. By the end of the book, I realized that Berry was remarkably efficient in maintaining the detail to clue ratio; all the strange little facts aren’t there for just atmospherics, they are essential plot points. And Berry’s prose, which carefully shifts as the tone of the book changes, is really impressive.

If you think you might enjoy a mystery with dry humor and a twist of surreality, check out The Manual of Detection.