Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?

Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box set masquerading as a novel. As such it will be great. A New York setting, a cast that’s a Noah’s Ark migrant mix (from Afro to Vietnamese), a gripping crime investigation and a historical and dramatic time-frame running from the New Year’s celebrations for the American bicentennial in 1976 to the nightmare of the 1977 New York blackout.

A box set is a distinct possibility. Hallberg has already sold the film rights. The plot’s got everything: poverty versuswealth, power and corruption, racial tension, drugs, punk anarchy, sex and, above all, connections between a great range of characters (some share the same shrink) as if the novel had spawned a whole fictional family. One sleepless night I counted to 33 and hypnagogically shifted Middlemarch to New York.

But don’t wait for the movie. There’s writing here that’s too good to miss. The novel’s construction is impressive. Hallberg must have covered a kitchen wall plotting the trajectory. Although the narrative arc spans the year between the shooting on New Year’s Eve 1976 of a girl in Central Park and the anarchic night of the 1977 blackout, the novel’s division into seven books allows Hallberg flashbacks to the Fifties and Sixties in which to explore the characters’ lives and the city’s history.

The girl who is shot — Sam Cicciaro, the firework genius’s daughter — becomes emblematic of the city’s violence and corruption, and, as she lies in a coma in Beth Israel hospital we watch New York come to the boil. Among the memorable characters in one way or another connected to Sam are William Hamilton-Sweeney III (aka Billy Three-Sticks), the wastrel heir of a financial empire; Charlie the chop-haired youngster, part visionary, occasional punk, who saves dogs and buildings; Larry Pulaski, the crippled cop, not to mention Solomon Grungy, Nicky Chaos, Mercer Goodman (who is) and Keith Lamplighter — Hallberg has a Dickensian ear for names.