The Long Goodbye

I know I’ve said it before when reading stuff by Eric Ambler, but I’m such a fan of film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction.  It makes me feel like such a bad feminist too, because it is mostly men telling women what to do and shooting at each other.  In fact, film noir’s all about the suppression of female power and sexuality (or it was in its early days in any case).  But I love it.  I love the writing style and the ridiculously complicated plots that bear so little resemblance to reality or to a crime anyone could ever hope to get away with.  The Long Goodbye is most definitely one of these, but it is so much more than this too.

It’s book six in the Philip Marlowe series by hard-boiled granddaddy Raymond Chandler.  It’s been a few years, but I have read The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, the first two books in the same series, as well.  And while nothing Chandler wrote could ever live up to the former, The Long Goodbye is still pretty damn good. 

The part of the Wikipedia article that summarises the plot is pushing 700 words, so I won’t even really try here.  Essentially, Marlowe is asked to investigate the murder of a friend’s wife, it looks like his friend did it especially when said friend flees to Mexico and kills himself.  Things get complicated. 

Anyway, one of the main things that I like about the book is that it does actually acknowledge male weakness and the trauma of war.  Most the main mystery is linked to the back story of three soldiers who became friends while fighting in World War Two and the injuries one of them sustained while fighting.  One of the central messages of the book seems to be, as one character puts it, “the tragedy of life… is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.”  The only reason the whole mess happens is because the men come back from war and they come back changed.  Even Marlowe doesn’t escape.  He is less assured that in earlier books, more prone to doubt.  Vulnerabilities show that don’t crop up in The Big Sleep.  He is no longer a young man, he is aging and years of alcoholism have taken their toll mentally and physically.  More than this, he has a home now, a mailbox and a front yard.  He isn’t just a detective; he is a man who has a mortgage to pay off.

I enjoyed this book.  It is dark as all hell.  Chandler’s descriptions of Marlowe’s experiences of as an alcoholic are disturbing on a visceral level.  It somehow manages to weave phrases like, “Don’t push me.  Give me time.  The worms in my solar plexus crawl and crawl and crawl,” together with a mystery that, in all honesty, has a fairly sill resolution.  And it works.  There is no way it should work, but it does.  Chandler was always one of those writers who had a real understanding of the dark poetry of lowlife.  That’s why I love hard-boiled fiction so much.  It takes something shabby and beautifies it through the prism of a well turned phrase.  The Long Goodbye ultimately made me want to go back and reread Chandler’s early work to see if I can see the cracks in Marlowe’s façade and it’s that addictive quality that really makes his works great.

Next time: Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head.

White Noise

I accidentally read White Noise in one day.  I’m not sure how I managed it, because it’s not that unputdownable and I had a lot of things to do on the day that I read this book.  I’m going to chalk it up to procrastination.  That’s how I read a lot of books.  So, I shirked my responsibilities for an entire day to read this book, and I’m shirking them again now to write about it: that’s how you succeed in life.

Don DeLillo’s novel is a hard one to describe plot-wise.   It’s about university professor Jack Gladney, creator of Hitler studies, who is happy.  He has a happy family life with his wife and various children from each of their various marriages and there’s no tension caused by the blended family.  He is happy, they are happy- there is no other word for it.  The only thing that blights Jack’s happiness or his wife Babette’s is the fear of death.  Although say they want to be the first to die so as to not have to live without the other, Jack wants to live for as long as possible.  He fears death to the point that he almost craves immortality.  After nothing major happens to the characters for 120 pages or so, there is The Toxic Airborne Event.  Despite sounding like a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, this is a plot device to make Jack confront the horrible reality that he, too, is mortal.

It’s the second half of the novel that really contains the entire plot, but somehow I enjoyed the first half more.  There’s a very good chance that I was a little burnt out (it has been a while since I read almost 400 pages in a day), but I liked the charm of nothing happening and hanging out with this pretty quirky family.  Instead of actually writing about the book properly, I might just pick out bits that I liked.  Jack has a fairly fun conversation with a doctor in which he is lying about everything in an attempt to have the doctor tell him he is healthy, as though the doctor’s words and his actual health are intrinsically linked and he can be cured by being told he is well (this is better put into the actual thematic context of the book, but funny out of context).  There are a fair few off the cuff remarks about Hitler that appeal to my sense of humour too.

One of the more obscure bits that I really enjoyed is near the end.  There’s this hospital run by German nuns and none of them believe in God.  Their faith is a pretense set up to reassure the world.  The fact that they are there are keeping up the faith, the old ways and traditions, means that others are free to abandon them and keep the comforting knowledge that tradition lives on.  And in turn instead of a life dedicated to God, the nuns live a life dedicated to the lie.  It’s brilliant stuff. 

I have little else to say about the book, maybe I read it too quickly, but it’s a really enjoyable read and highly recommended.  Go and try it yourself. 

I’m now moving on to The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.  Spoiler: I love Raymond Chandler.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.  I know that Heinrich Böll won the Nobel Prize in literature (mostly because the cover of the book tells me so) so you’d hope he’d be good.  But then J M Coetzee has one of those and I can’t stand a bunch of the stuff that he’s written.  It is good, though I don’t know if it’s enjoyable.  The book is more than forty years old and it describes a society that is still recognisable for all the wrong reasons. 

Katharina Blum is an innocent young woman who meets and quickly falls in love with a man who is, unbeknownst to her, a bank robber.  When she helps him escape from the police while leaving her flat a media shit storm naturally descends.  One journalist in particular, Werner Tötges, goes to town on her.  He leaves no stone uncovered in a bid to dig up any dirt in an attempt to vilify Blum in his paper Die Zeitung, leaving things like facts and morality firmly to one side.  It’s kind of how I assume The Daily Mail operates; Tötges’s calibre of journalism would certainly fit in there.

The problem I had with this book is that is left me despairing for society a little and especially tabloid journalism.  The only thing that has changed from 1974 is that access to media has gotten easier and so the scope for these kinds of bullshit tabloid lies has just gotten wider.  Not to flog an (unfortunately) very much alive horse but The Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame is a case in point of this.  People, women especially, are vilified for things as trivial as not wearing make-up to get a cup of coffee or having too many relationships.  It’s sad because this story could still happen today, and with our instant media it wouldn’t even take the four days of the novel for things to come to their crescendo.

One of my favourite parts of the book was in relation to how the tabloids sensationalise things.  Tötges interviews the other residences of Blum’s block of flats and most of them have little to say about her; she is a typical single woman who works and occasionally has men to stay; nothing shocking.  Tötges twists her into a woman with a revolving door for men.  Her employer describes her as a, “very intelligent, cool, level-headed person,” this becomes the much more lurid, “ice-cold and calculating.”  Tötges journalism has just enough journalism in it to not be libel, but it’s an amazing transformation of the truth. 

I feel like, in all this, I should write more about Katharina Blum herself.  She is an interesting character, meticulous and precise and I do like her.  But this isn’t her story.  It’s the story of her story, the construction of her media identity and the truth is that she as an individual matters little in this.  Again, this just leaves me with sadness that we have not built a better way to do the news or seemingly learnt any lessons in the forty-two years we have had since the publication of (to give th book its full title) The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead.

My next book is White Noise by Don DeLillo.