Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave

In the acknowledgements that follow the defiant, triumphant closing sentences of Paul Cleave’s eighth novel, Five Minutes Alone, the writer makes something of a lament: nearly a decade after he conceived the first book in the Theodore Tate crime series, he has finally caught up in age – the far side of 40 – to his protagonist.

Cleave notes also that the novel was written on the move while chasing summer, taking in Christchurch, where he lives and sets his work, the United Kingdom and hotel rooms in the United States and on the European continent. The relentless motion behind its creation might have inspired the thrum of kinetic energy that beats through the novel, the lives contained within it racing onward until some are brought to abrupt and unwilling halt. (This Christchurch, a mecca for the vengeful and violent, is not for the faint of heart. I shudder to think what monstrosities might be found in Cleave’s Auckland or Wellington.)

What Cleave doesn’t mention, perhaps due to Kiwi humility or that writerly notion that you can never quite get on the page what you have in your head, is that over the course of the last decade and the sundry travails that have taken Tate in and out of prison, coma and the New Zealand police force, is that the author has written his way to the apex of crime fiction. Five Minutes Alone is simply world-class.

The novel starts as it goes on, with an aggressive confrontation that sets the scene for the realization of revenge fantasies and the pondering of that unanswerable philosophical conundrum: whether two wrongs make a right. The title refers to a common plea of the aggrieved and bereaved to the novel’s detectives; having lost a loved one to the ugly actions of another, they will ask for that specific amount of time with the perpetrator, no more or less. Their pain, they believe, constitutes their right.

Five Minutes Alone examines the consequences of that wish being granted in the world as it’s known by Tate, a consciously imperfect man with a known propensity to mete out justice outside the system. As the father of a child killed by a recidivist drink driver in a collision that also left his wife with brain trauma, Tate took his own five minutes alone. And when the ‘Five Minute Man’ – foil to Tate’s ‘Second Chance King’, a sardonic reference to his knack for survival on every front – sets out to remedy historical failings of the authorities, Tate’s ethical boundaries are tested unto death, and his own vigilantism threatens to undo him once and for all.

The quality of Cleave’s writing is stunning, recalling Stephen King’s recent foray into the same genre in Mr Mercedes, while his pacing is no less hectic and thrilling than that of Lee Child, master of the explosive encounter and Manichaean approach to the correction of criminal behaviour.

From its early pages, Five Minutes Alone has a mood of finality and universal consequence. Whether the embattled is Tate himself or the antihero Five Minute Man fighting off a posse of meatheads at an abandoned mental hospital – an excellent sequence that mirrors the cat-and-mouse game at the heart of the story – the noose is tightening and the hourglass emptying. Revenge may be sweet, but it’s wont to be hellishly messy, and in Cleave’s noir Christchurch, it can be awfully difficult to bury the dead.