Structural corruption in Peace’s Yorkshire is a Gnostic reality beyond illumination

Evidence

The Gnostics thought that the world was made of a corrupt matter characterised by heavy weight and impenetrable opacity: a murky, muddy mire in which fallen angels – one of the persistent images in the Red Riding books – are trapped. There is no question of Hunter, or solicitor John Piggott in 1983 – or even Peace – being able to completely illuminate what has happened. This is a world in which, as Tony Grisoni, the screenwriter who adapted the novels for Channel 4, puts it, ‘narratives disappear into the dark’. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 182

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how Gnostic cosmology supplies a template for reading a crime-novel world where nothing can be fully illuminated.
• XREF: connects to: Evil can be read as proof rather than disproof of God’s existence — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 185; Matching corrupt worlds can still carry opposite political orientations — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 179