Wanted to be Tolstoy: James Ellroy sets high standards for his crime fiction.
Perfidia by James Ellroy (William Heinemann)
There is a little-known Austrian documentary about James Ellroy, titled The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, in which the Los Angeles author can be seen howling at the sky and then dropping to his knees on the beach and making paws with his hands.
Towards the end, Ellroy says: “I wanted to be Tolstoy … I wanted to be Balzac. Yeah. I wanted to be all these guys that — quite frankly — I have never really read. I wanted to give people crime fiction on an epic, transcendental scale.”
I bring this to your attention because Perfidia is surely his best shot at the second half of this ambition. My guess is that we’re deep into the dark side of 200 000 words. The dramatis personae alone runs to four-and-a-half pages. And, yes, this is an epic and bizarrely transcendental novel that represents an extraordinary achievement by any measure.
Many people know Ellroy as the author of The LA Quartet, which includes The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. Perfidia, so the endnotes tell us, is the first volume of the second LA Quartet; the beginning of a prequel that Ellroy hopes will leave him and us with “one novelistic history” comprising 11 books — the two quartets plus his Underworld American trilogy.
This second quartet “places real-life and fictional characters from the first two bodies of work in Los Angeles during World War II as significantly younger people”. The zone of Ellroy’s ambition, then, is an American Comédie humaine.
Perhaps the first thing to say is that “perfidia” as a word — the profession of faith or friendship, made only to betray — simply doesn’t cover it. This is 700 pump-action pages of brutality, sex, extortion, eugenics, blackmail, back-stabbing and booze: a sustained farrago of social, moral and human chaos that makes Vice City look like a Christian folk festival. Venality is ubiquitous, murder casual, racism commonplace.
Early on in the book, a character accused of getting things out of proportion is told: “There is no proportion. Pearl Harbor took care of that.”
The action — an underpowered word in this context — takes place over 23 days in December 1941. On day one, a Japanese family of four, the Watanabes, are found in their “blood-soaked, blood-immersed” living room, their “entrails flared across the floor”. On day two, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour. And, from this point on, the entire cast of Ellroy’s city chase liquor and drugs with such savagery that, by the end, you’re murmuring about how Irvine Welsh is going to have to be reshelved with the children’s books.
The principal plot centres on these Japanese murders, which are used, by way of a faked and heavily publicised investigation, to vouchsafe “evidence” that the racist police department is not racist. But as one cop says: “Who gives a shit who killed the fucking Watanabes?”
Soon the four protagonists — William H Parker, a bad cop; Dudley Smith, a really bad cop; Hideo Ashida, a gay forensic-genius cop; and Kay Lake, a dreamer shacked up with a bad cop and “possessed of stunning artistry but no character or conviction” — are meshed into a deepening lattice-work of perfidy and corruption, each new layer of which reveals itself to be “bone dirtier” than the last. With war declared, Ellroy’s habitual vices — sexploitation, racketeering, murder; “wedges, fulcrums, coercion” — are supplemented by a febrile fifth-column fascism, by frenzied war profiteering, torture, internment and the cutting up of Japanese-Americans to look Chinese by the crazed plastic surgeon, Dr Lin Chung.
This all makes for a genuinely impressive feat of sustained literary energy: 90% of novelists couldn’t get anywhere near it. But what of the first part of Ellroy’s stated intent — to take on Tolstoy and Balzac?
Well, not quite. Ultimately, Ellroy’s foibles as a writer swamp his many skills. His ubiquitous nail-gun prose (deployed in over-repeated triplets: “The wind kicked through. Broken glass shattered. Door padlocks thumped.”) deafens the reader and disables the writer in his reach for range and subtlety.
Too many scenes are served up on steroids and delivered in the same emotional register. The cumulative effect is to demote the impact of what is said and done, so that the noir gradually decomposes into a macabre burlesque — “Grown men wolf-howled and waved shrunken heads”.
Great novelists disappear so that their characters no longer seem to partake in their creator’s sensibilities but instead become real unto themselves and thus to the reader.
But Ellroy cross-infects his cast list with such similar traits and strains that they begin to flatten into collage rather than come forward as people. In War and Peace (also a historical novel), Tolstoy succeeds in rendering the entirety of a world — often violent, often venal — wherein his creations are superbly varied.
The point being that he has vanished: and that the difference is to do with the imaginative faculty of the writer behind the work.
But in Perfidia, “the world is dark and flat”, as Ellroy himself writes. When real-life people enter the frame — Sergei Rachmaninoff tending his garden, Bette Davis sleeping with Dudley Smith — the paradoxical effect is to remind us that this story is not real; the fictive spell is broken, not bound, as it is with Tolstoy’s historical figures.
But I’m only holding Ellroy to these standards because they are the worthy aim of the man. His is still an awe-inspiring artistic vision and this is a novel that should surely be read by new readers as well as fans. — © Guardian News & Media 2014
Edward Docx’s most recent novel is The Devil’s Garden (Picador)