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| Children’s Books: Color Schemes An illustrated poem about the seasons; a story about a penguin searching for new colors; and a collection of classic fairy tales with vivid pictures. feeds.nytimes.com |
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy Machine gun prose meets labyrinthine plot in James Ellroy's latest, says Sean O'HaganThe title of James Ellroy's latest novel is taken from AE Housman's poem "Reveille", a very English meditation on life's brevity. Four lines from the poem also provide the book's epigraph. Discovering that Ellroy digs Housman is one of the few surprising things about Blood's a Rover, the concluding part of the novelist's Underworld USA trilogy. It's as if Metallica had decided to call an album after a work by Vaughan Williams.In Ellroy's fiction, blood is more often a river. Though he has long since transcended the formal constraints of the traditional crime novel, he remains wedded to its hard-boiled tone, a tone that he, more than anyone else, has contemporised. Here, as with the preceding novels that make up the trilogy, American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001), the labyrinthine plot demands that the reader pays total attention throughout while simultaneously being beaten into submission by sentences that are often nasty and brutish and always short. It's quite a style and one marvels once again at the obsessively brilliant brain behind it. But, boy, is it exhausting.It begins characteristically with a vivid flashback: a cinematically violent description of a highway robbery, LA-style, in 1964. "The milk truck driver pulled a silencered piece and shot the nearest guard in the face. The noise was a thud. The guard's face exploded. The two other guards fumble-grabbed at their holsters. The masked men shot them in the back. They buckled and pitched forward. The masked men shot them in the head point-blank. The thuds and skull crack muffle-echoed. It's 7.19am. It's still quiet."There is much to admire here, not least the Joycean ingenuity of "fumble-grabbed" and "muffle-echoed" and the deadpan black humour of the pay-off line. At around 600 pages, though, Blood's a Rover, like its equally dense precursors, is an awful lot of short sentences. Even a third of the way in I was longing for a respite from the machine gun prose, for just one Rothian passage, a sentence that would snake on and on luxuriantly into a long paragraph. Some hope.Since American Tabloid propelled him out of the epically adventurous but still recognisably Chandleresque territory of his brilliant LA Quartet – The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz – Ellroy has adhered to this staccato but epic style. His novels also tend toward the metafictional in making use of real events, multiple, often unreliable, narrative points of view and "document inserts" – FBI and police records, journal entries, interview transcripts. His aim is to retell in a new, illuminating way the more turbulent episodes in late 20th-century American history from the point of view of those involved at both the highest levels of political power and the lowest levels of criminal activity. His subtext, though, is an old one: it was ever thus.Here, as before, it is the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King that cast a shadow over the action, while the cover-ups and conspiracies that attend the Nixon era provide the murky political and cultural landscape that Ellroy navigates in his inimitably obsessive fashion. Thankfully, on the conspiracy front, he is more Don DeLillo than Oliver Stone – it was DeLillo's Libra that influenced him most when plotting the trilogy.As always, what entrances and appals is the extremity of Ellroy's vision. Blood's a Rover is not a book for the politically correct reader, nor the overly sensitive one. Corruption, in Ellroy's world, is always total and extreme. Only Wayne Tedrow Junior survives from The Cold Six Thousand, but now he's no longer an LAPD man, but a drug runner. He has also slept with his stepmother, Janice, who is now dying of cancer. He plies her with heroin for the pain. They have already killed his father, her ex-husband. Or, as Ellroy puts it, by way of bringing the reader up to speed: "Wayne decided to murder his father. Wayne decided that Janice should beat him dead with a golf club."In Ellroy's world, every plot, however sub, congeals; every character, however amoral, is capable of surprising us – and himself – with some new sin. So it is with the two other main characters, Dwight Holly and Don "Crutch" Crutchfield, the one an FBI agent who is a graduate of Yale Law School and whose daddy was big in the Ku Klux Klan, the other a 23-year-old loser from a bad family who has landed a job as a wheelman. (For the uninitiated, a wheelman does the menial work for "skank private eyes and divorce lawyers", which makes them, as Ellroy succinctly puts it, "low-rent and indigenously fucked-up".)Against a backdrop in which Nixon comes to power and America's cities explode into violent protest, Wayne, Dwight and Crutch chase their own tainted dreams of power and/or revenge. Wayne works for Howard Hughes, who is holed up in Vegas, but has both the Mob and the Feds on his tail. Dwight is trying to infiltrate a radical black nationalist organisation called, with Ellroy's usual liberal-baiting relish, the Black Tribe Alliance and the Mau Mau Liberation Front. Only Crutch is keeping it real by conforming to the conventions of the crime novel. He is chasing a femme fatale – Gretchen Farr aka Celia Reyes – who he hopes will lead him to the even more mysterious Joan Klein. If, by this stage, you are still looking for answers, Joan may have them. Me, I was still trying to figure out the questions.Throughout, there are the usual suspects – bent cops, even more bent politicians, conmen, molls and a cast of venal and corrupt men, some of whom – against all the odds – possess just a sliver of conscience. They remain, as in all Ellroy's fiction, in the minority. It is Crutch, the most shady and sordid of the triumvirate of central characters, who redeems himself, emerging from the wreckage of the time to testify to its cataclysmic import.For all the vivid pencil sketches, Ellroy is not big on characterisation and the density of the plot may leave all but the utterly committed utterly confused. Then again, The Cold Six Thousand made the American bestseller list, which suggests that Ellroy's late style, once surrendered to, may prove strangely addictive. "You will read with some reluctance and capitulate in the end," writes the unlikely narrator, the chief witness, in his preamble. "The following pages will force you to succumb." That about nails it.FictionJames EllroySean O'Haganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
What were your worst books of the decade? It's all very well to make lists of the decade's best books, but surely the worst books would give future generations a truer glimpse of the noughties. Let's name and shameAs I'm sure you are all too aware, there are a lot of lists in circulation at the moment. There's a very big one building up here about the best books of the last decade, in fact. I have nothing against these things. It's good fun disagreeing with them all. But I do worry that they don't give a true reflection of our culture. Such relentless positivity is always unrealistic, given the misery of mortality and the continuing stupidity of most of our species, but it seems especially wrong in the decade of Tony Blair, George Bush, September 11, global warming and global recession. Worse still, it distorts the historical record. To remember only achievement and worth is to ignore the vast majority of our cultural experience. It helps create that strange cultural telescoping that makes us think that the past was always better; that odd warping of collective memory that enables us to recall even the 1970s fondly. Anyone reading about those years now would think they were all about the kaleidoscopic glories of The Godfather and Taxi Driver in the cinemas, Saul Bellow and Hunter S Thompson in their prime and David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin. Of course, the real beige and brown reality was Alf Garnett on TV, Jonathan Livingston's Seagull in the bookshops and the Carpenters and David Cassidy in the charts.The imbalance needs to be redressed. In the interests of honesty and of letting future generations know what it was really like to live in the noughties, I therefore propose that we here commemorate the very worst writing of the decade. (And if that all sounds a bit negative to you, think of it as another way of reflecting back how wonderful and exceptional the best books are.)There are millions of books that just weren't worth the tree-death that it's hard to know where to begin. I imagine there are rich pickings to be had among all the celebrity autobiographies, celebrity novels, celebrity-endorsed cookbooks and celebrity home decoration adventures. Few things sum up the pre-recession madness as much as the fact that a footballer was paid £5m for three volumes of autobiography before his 21st birthday. It's also hard to avoid mentioning Dan Brown. The astonishing sales of The Da Vinci Code prove conclusively that 80 million people most certainly can be wrong. Jeffrey Archer, too, deserves honourable mention for trying to bring Kane and Abel, one of the worst books of the 1980s, back into contention by rewriting and rereleasing it. Admittedly, I haven't read the revamped version, and the fact that he reportedly aimed to better Kane and Abel mark one by lopping off 31,000 words did make me wonder if there might be some improvement. But then I learned that he put another 27,000 back in.I admit that Archer is a soft target; even the Telegraph failed to give him a good review, strain as they might. No, more intriguing by far are the over-rated books. There's nothing worse than being told something is wonderful only to discover it's actually The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru. And who passed the law that everybody had to give a good review to On Chesil Beach? What fear prevented so many journalists from admitting that McEwan had laid down a stinker?Which brings us neatly on to the especially bitter fruit of bad books by good authors. How could Don DeLillo follow Underworld with the overwrought absurdity of The Body Artist? Was Paul Auster aiming for absurd self-parody when he wrote Oracle Night or had he just disappeared up his own post-modern rectum?Then there are all those books that probably shouldn't have won the Booker prize. Which is to say, all the books that won the Booker prize (perhaps with the exception of Wolf Hall and The True History of the Kelly Gang). And, and… I could go on like this for a very long time, but I'm sure you get the idea. So let us know. Which were the worst books of the decade?FictionDan BrownBest booksSam Jordisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Rumi's Masnavi, part 5: On love | Franklin Lewis For Rumi, love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries and the animating force of creationA man in love, no matter what he saysThe smell of love wafts love-ward from his mouthHe speaks of jurisprudence, what emerges?From mystic poverty a sweet effulgenceHe blasphemes, the scent of faith arisesHe offers doubts, no doubt we grow more sureMasnavi 1: 2880-82Rumi urges us to choose voluntary poverty as a way of being in the world, as we saw earlier; we might perhaps think of this chosen poverty (faqr) in modern terms as the simple life of moderation. As we have also seen, Rumi calls us to a natural theology of sorts, encouraging us to learn to read the mystical signs inscribed upon the human breast by the fingers of God. This is the language of love, an orientation and an attitude which, for Rumi, defines the very essence of righteousness and true religion. It does not matter if the seeker of truth approaches truth through law, through skepticism or even blasphemy, so long as that seeker turns to face the truth of the sun, and is attuned to the meaning of love.The Sufis early on co-opted the language of earthly love poetry as a metaphor for the divine beloved, just as they adapted the language of wine poetry and terrestrial inebriation as symbolic of the transcendental mystic experience, in which the worshipper loses control of his rational faculties, and becomes a God-intoxicated lover of the divine beauty. Rumi's theology draws upon love as both eros ('ishq) and agape (mahabbat):Agape then describes what's real, Eros, too.Masnavi 5: 2186The force of love, even if initially a this-wordly desire, in the end can lead us toward the transcendent beloved (Masnavi 1:111). Love transcends questions of faith and infidelity – love is the kernel contained within the shell of the dichotomy of blasphemy and religion (2 :1529-31, 2, 3322). Love grows in the garden of human perfection (5: 2742-44), and exalts the earthly body above the seven heavens (1: 25). In the realm of free will and pre-destination, divine wisdom made human beings lovers of one another (3: 4400-4403), although everything is the beloved, while the lover is just a foil (1: 30), an illusionary separation of subject and object. Love is the physician that cures all our symptoms – it is our Plato and our Galen (1: 22-24).The partial intellect may reject love (Masnavi 1: 1982), caught up as it is in rationality. Worship through ascetic self-denial, motivated by fear of sin or awe of the mysterium tremendum, while it can help us gain control of the baser self, ultimately produces a flat-footed and desiccated spirituality, insofar as it is not impelled by love.The fearful ascete treks his faith on footThe lovers flash ahead like lightning, windMasnavi 5: 2192 Fear is a human trait, not a divine attribute, whereas "Love describes the Lord" (Masnavi 5: 2184-5). The godhead requites our love, since the love of God establishes a mutuality between creator and creatures. As stated in the Qur'an (5: 54), God loves a people and they love him. Rumi in fact alludes to a famous tradition – "I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known, so I created the creation to be known" – explaining love as the underlying motivation for God's creation:Were it not for the ocean of pure love What reason would I have to forge the heavens?Masnavi 5: 2739Rumi even seems to posit love as the primal element of creation, a vital force that stirs the universe and creates the noosphere (to borrow a term from Teilhard de Chardin):It's waves of love that make the heavens turnWithout that love the universe would freeze:No mineral absorbed by vegetableNo growing thing consumed by animalNo sacrifice of anima for HimWho inspired Mary with His pregnant breathLike ice, all of them unmoved, frozen stiffNo vibrant molecules in swarms of motionLovers of perfection, every atomTurns sapling-like to face the sun and growTheir haste to shed their fleshly form for soulSings out an orison of praise to GodMasnavi 5: 3854-9Love is thus a mystic force for Rumi – it is the "Astrolabe of the divine mysteries" (Masnavi 1: 110). Whatever one says in explication of the theology of love is embarrassingly incomplete, because love speaks without words, and reason gets stuck in the mud trying to describe it (Masnavi 1: 112-115).Love's detailed explanation's still untoldthough Judgment Days – hundreds – may come and goFor the length of the Judgment Day is fixed,but how curtail description of the Lord?Masnavi 5: 2189-90Love cannot be carried or contained in wordsLove's an ocean of unfathomed depth:Infinite, the ocean's drops of waterYet the Seven Seas, tiny, next to loveMasnavi 5: 2731-2ReligionPoetryIslamMiddle EastFranklin Lewisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Bonfire of the Bureaucrats A splendid and compact study of the failure of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. feeds.nytimes.com |