Stars: 3.5
Blurb: Optimistic. Naive. Ostracised. Isolated.
Oscar Herald’s first day as a Probationary Constable in the New South Wales Police Force did not go as expected.
His dedication to policing, his emotions and his mind are pushed to their limits as he crashes headlong against a carefully indoctrinated organisational culture.
From the twisted political machinations that manipulate the very top executive officers, to the chasm between policy and practice separating criminals and victims at its grimy bottom, Oscar struggles to find support from those around him who have fallen victim to the syndrome ensuring justice will not be served.
As a multiple murderer threatens the lives of thousands, Oscar’s attempts to track him are hindered and dismissed.
With no-one willing to listen and nowhere to turn, Oscar seeks absolution in a desperate attempt to catch a killer and faces consequences that he could never have imagined.
The challenge for every reader will be to differentiate what is fiction and what isn’t.
This is one of those reads that’s going to leave you uncomfortable even as it is engrossing.
The press release for TJF Syndrome describes this as a challenge for readers to figure out what’s real and what’s not. Given that it is written by a former Sydney NSW police officer, I finished this book hoping much of it wasn’t real.
TJF Syndrome follows Oscar, an idealistic new recruit into the NSW police department. He is everything you would want a police officer to be – dedicated, eager to do right by the job and the people he signed up to protect. But, as TJF Syndrome progresses, all of those characteristics are stamped out of him by the experienced officers he finds himself working with. These are the officers that know how to avoid taking a call and saving themselves hours of paperwork, or how to question a beaten wife so as to ensure, again, minimum paperwork after.
I started this book assuming the police force was filled with people like Oscar and didn’t want to hear about what happens behind closed doors in the force. But this book, written by a former police officer and drawn from his own experiences, was confronting. I don’t want to believe this of the police force, because if I can’t trust them, who can I trust?
It’s ugly, it’s political and every man is out for himself. I imagine there are Oscars out there in the police force doing their best, but it’s the abundance of his opposites, as shown in the book, that tend to eclipse the Oscars and the good they do. Everyone but Oscar is out to be able to do the least amount of work in order to go home with their paycheck at the end of the day – and I mean that literally as you’ll see when you read this.
Oscar’s introduction to the realities of the police force is played out against the politics of the higher ups, and the search for a terror suspect – a timely topic – but in the book Oscar is on his own. No one believes he’s found a possible suspect because it would too much work for them to do so. While an engrossing part of the book, and incorporating Twitter and technology, for me at least it paled against the machinations and politics of the force.
Stanley’s writing is crisp, and his characters will stick with you long after the book has finished because you don’t want them to be real even though deep down you know they must be. But, the pacing somewhat slows in parts with the inclusion of NSW police procedural explanations (and political ones) that are a necessity, particularly when it comes to the inner-workings of the force. It does increase your understanding of Oscar as he slowly realises nothing is ever going to change.
The ending, well, there’s a reason this book is called: TJF Syndrome. This Job is Fucked.
