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Frantic trip through Ellroy’s wild underworld
08 November 2009 Reviewed by Declan Burke
Blood’s A Rover
By James Ellroy
Century, €14
The first two novels in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy - American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand - were joyously irreverent works of revisionism.
Historical figures such as John F Kennedy, J Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes jostled for page space with fictional creations, as Ellroy offered up conspiracy theories on the assassination of JFK in American Tabloid (an unholy alliance of the FBI, the mob and politically radical mercenaries), and continued in the same vein with The Cold Six Thousand (Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King get bumped off by an unholy alliance of rogue FBI agents, anti-Castro revolutionaries, the mob and fascist Mormons).
You might expect, then, that the trilogy would conclude with that nadir of American democracy, the Watergate scandal.
While Richard Nixon takes his place as a character in Ellroy’s latest rogues’ gallery, however, this novel takes off at a tangent to the previous two, as - oh yes! - an unholy alliance of the mob, FBI head J Edgar Hoover and an assortment of Caribbean dictators struggle to establish the Dominican Republic as an offshore gambling nirvana to replace the millionaires’ paradise that was pre-Castro Cuba.
As always, Ellroy includes enough story in the 600 or so pages to fuel five or six novels:
running parallel to the main plot are a number of narratives, chief among them multiple clandestine investigations into an unsolved Los Angeles heist in 1962, in which a fabled stash of emeralds was stolen, emeralds which were subsequently used to finance a communist backed resistance to the ever-increasing right-wing subversion of American democracy, both at home and abroad.
Three characters dominate proceedings. Dwight Holly, the disaffected FBI agent from The Cold Six Thousand, returns, spreading mayhem and mischief through his ‘black ops’ programmes. The patricidal Wayne Tedrow also makes another appearance, this time given amore prominent role as a morally conflicted go-between connecting the FBI with the mafia.
Donald ‘Peeper’ Crutch-field is a new character, and one who offers a prurient interest to Ellroy aficionados: a scuzzy voyeur from a young age who spends his spare time building a file on the mother who abandoned him, he is Ellroy’s most autobiographical character to date, and in part reprises the themes Ellroy explored in The Black Dahlia, motivated as he is by psycho-sexual insecurities and - as many of Ellroy’s characters tend to be - a quixotic obsession with saving women from themselves.
The style, while nowhere as forbiddingly austere as The Cold Six Thousand, is nonetheless immediately identifiable as characteristically Ellroy. Sentences are brutally truncated and syntax is deliberately mangled.
Often, chapters last less than a page and half. The pace is relentless, as Ellroy manically chases back and forth between third-per son points-of-view, tossing in phone transcripts, newspaper extracts and diary entries for good measure.
It is an exhilarating, compelling and exhausting read, dense with information and plot twists, laced with authentic period detail, and frantic with betrayal, treble cross and all-too-human switches of allegiance that result in disgrace, murder, suicide and ruin.
It is a monumental work of fiction, so much so that at times you are surprised to realise it is printed on paper and not chiselled from stone. There are, of course, caveats.
A reader coming fresh to Blood’s A Rover without having read the previous novels of the Underworld USA trilogy may find themselves lost for the want of accessible reference points.
More importantly, Ellroy employs a narrative framing device that results, for the most part of the novel, in all of the characters using the same ‘voice’. This is disconcerting not because it’s difficult to work out who is saying what (it’s not), but because it appears that Ellroy has locked into one particular voice and failed to differentiate between his characters.
When the framing device is revealed at the very end, the homogenous nature of the ‘voice’ makes perfect sense, but that may prove too little, too late for some readers.
That said, Blood’s A Rover is a novel of rare ambition and scope , an iconoclastic blast of linguistic fireworks and a tantalising glimpse of the subterranean workings of American politics that feels so real it might even be true(ish). If it is not the tour de force that its predecessors were, that’s no fault of Donald ‘Peeper’ Crutchfield, one of the most compelling fictional creations of the last decade.
Declan Burke is an author and critic
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