Keeping Tabs

Okay, to be expanded, but books in the last while:

A Mercy - Toni Morrison
Just couldn't get into it. I dislike fiction that tries to replicate a person's dialect (put me off Robert Louis Stevenson for quite a while after I read 'Thrawn Janet'), and the parts of the novel told by Florens aggravated me. Morrison tries to tell her (very simple) story through the stories of her characters and as an insight into 17th Century America, it has its interesting aspects. However, drawing similarities between slavery and indenture is hardly ground-breaking. For a more subtle analysis of the dynamics of slavery read Octavia Butler.

The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula Le Guin
Or Ursula Le Guin. The world is changed by put-upon George Orr's dreams, and things get tough when self-righteous psychiatrist, Dr Haber, gets his claws into him. Sounds like Philip K. Dick, but Le Guin has a discipline to her narrative that Dick rarely showed. Not that there ain't problems (I hate 'real world' prophecies, aliens and clichéd 'battle against the wind' endings), but there's far too much that's brilliant here not to be won over. Fine stuff.

Trouble Is My Business - Raymond Chandler
Just a novella, but Marlowe all the same. A routine muck-raking case escalates into a massacre in Chandler's inimitable way. Always passes the time.

Just reading Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood' now. A novel of grotesques that spawned everything from 'Taxi Driver' to 'A Confederacy of Dunces', as far as I can see. I link O'Connor to Shirley Jackson in the way I might link Morrison to Butler, but I'm liking O'Connor a lot more than I did Morrison. I'll keep you posted.

Back on the Beat

I haven't exactly been burning the blog boards up of late. A little extra curricular activity has been taking up my time, so reading, viewing, etc. has gone a little by the wayside. Having said that...

 

I did read Chandler's 'The Curtain' featuring Carmady, probably the next most common detective in his oeuvres next to Marlowe. Although I only saw, not read, 'Farewell, My Lovely', both the Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum versions, and a long time ago, there are a lot of parallels; old rich man in huge house, missing (good) girl, and especially the garage scene. The next story, 'Try the Girl', has similarities too, at least in a 'Moose Malloy'-type called Skalla.

 

I've read a lot of Chandler's 'Collected Short Fiction' at this stage and am still only halfway through. Very readable stuff. The old story about Chandler not knowing who killed the driver in the movie version of 'The Big Sleep', makes perfect sense. You don't need to know what exactly is happening to enjoy these tales, and sometimes it probably helps if you don't. There is a hypnotic quality to the writing, very much like an oral account, which makes sense too when you consider that most are told in the first person. You just go with the flow trusting that Carmady (and Chandler) knows his job and will get us there in the most efficient way in the end. I have a natural bias to Hammett, but I can still appreciate quality and this is quality.

Short, But Sour

I finished the Chandler short, 'Spanish Blood'. Coming from 1935, I think it's his first really mature work. Not that the others are 'immature', you understand (they're certainly great fun); it's just that this is the first to really capture the sense of world-weary sadness that characterises the best noir fiction. The cop, Delaguerra, strives for the best, but can only keep the world from the worst. It also features Chandler's first femme fatale, as far as I'm concerned. Although she is a relatively peripheral figure, she is a force that corrupts in spite of herself. In this story, sin tars all, and the wages of sin truly are death, spiritual death for some, but literal for most.

Blood and Whiskey

I read three of Raymond Chandler's 'short' stories over the weekend. They are more properly novellas being between 50 and 70 pages each. He is a different bird to Hammett, though they inhabit the same cage. The emphasis to my mind is on the malleability of story. Solutions to the various crimes - murder, kidnapping, blackmail - are offered throughout the tales by many different characters, each account plausible until skewered by a new development. Indeed the first tale I read, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot', cannot be said to have a definitive solution. This ambiguity of narrative is pure genius. However, sometimes ambiguity covers up the author's own confusion and when during the filming of Chandler's 'The Big Sleep', he was asked about the death of one of the characters (was it murder or suicide?), he himself could never give a satisfactory account.

By the way, Marlowe only turned up in the third tale, 'Finger Man', after two pretty strong predecessors, Mallory and Dalmas (each dealing with blackmail in Hollywood and linked to studio, Eclipse Films), dealt out the lead. And just how much whiskey can a detective drink and still detect? I thought Hammett's Ray and Nora Charles could drink, but Marlowe practically breathes the stuff!

The Chandler stories are in a volume of his collected stories, so it is a bit bulky to carry around. For that reason, I also started reading Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men', also knowing that the Coen Brothers' screen adaptation is imminent. It is a while since I read 'Blood Meridian', or 'All the Pretty Horses', and I kind of wondered whether this would be the gentle (slightly uninteresting) style of 'Horses' or the amoral, cataclysmic violence of 'Meridian'. Within ten pages I had my answer. I was reeling from shock. This could be powerful (stomach churning) stuff if the Coen Brothers do it right. Anyhow Chandler's copious fights and gunplay seemed like Agatha Christie when I went back to him, though none the worst for that. I look forward to reading both books.