Blood's A Rover
by James Ellroy
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Book Summary Information
Author: James EllroyEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-09-22
ISBN: 0679403930
Number of pages: 656
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Blood's A Rover
Book Review: An American Trilogy
Summary: 5 Stars
Whatever your view about James Ellroy, his Underworld USA trilogy is quite a piece of work and Blood's A Rover, its culmination, is one hell of a way to go out. He may have had the indelicacy to say it, but having closed the cover it's hard to disagree with Ellroy's own assessment of this novel's matchless quality. This is a really, really outstanding novel from an outstanding and unique writer.
Many of Ellroy's stylistic hallmarks, love 'em or hate 'em (for the record, I love 'em) are here: grandiloquent authorial claims to greatness, unremittingly bleak Hobbesian worldview (though here it is ultimately, if brutally, suffused with a sort of redemption), casual and unsettlingly entertaining violence and depravity, assorted strands of bigotry and a Byzantine, conspiracy-theory-goosing plot - all counterpointed with almost unbearably sparse, non-adjectival prose. It's all here. Most remarkable is the book's style and economy. James Ellroy says the plot outline for Blood's A Rover ran to 400 pages; the finished article is well shy of 650. In the hands of any other writer, this sort of enterprise would never get done short of 1500.
On that score, many detractors bitterly and bizarrely complain about Ellroy's prose style. On this site, the weaker ones lampoon it poorly. I find this complaint particularly absurd. If you like your prose style conventional, stay away: there are literally millions of workaday writers whose published works will keep you happy in your reading till your dying day. If there are millions of elegant stylists; there's only one James Ellroy; I can't think of another author (perhaps Cormac McCarthy) with as singular a stylistic vision, let alone such a stubbornness and bloody-minded commitment to his craft. Celebrate a writer with the talent, attitude and fortitude to do something different.
Ellroy's writing generally, and the Underworld USA series particularly, take some getting used to, for sure - it's virtually a dialect: a condensed, shorthand patois where half as many words carry twice as much content as conventional sentence. The temptation is to study every word hard, so as not to miss a vital clue. But to do this is to miss the vibrancy, the flow, the rhythm - the *vibe* - which is as important to grasp as the content itself. Like waterskiing, you need to aquaplane through the text to manage it.
And when you do, it's just exhilarating reading - short passages magically concertina into complex images. On the other hand, Ellroy's narrative method counterpoints the curtness of his prose: he tends to reframe the same information from multiple perspectives (the book is told from the point of view of three principle protagonists, together with diaries, reports and transcripts of conversations between half a dozen others), so if you keep the speed up, the shorthand argot miraculously and brilliantly coheres. At times it's like beat poetry; it syncopates, it grooves.
For all that (and despite some claims to the contrary) James Ellroy *has* eased up his prose styling from the three-word sentence limit on display in The Cold Six Thousand. Particularly with some helpful expository diaries, this is an easier - but no less rewarding - read.
The book's unusual title, taken from an A E Housman poem, jars at first - difficult at first glance to see the resonance between late 20th century American high-political intrigue and 19th century English poem cycle called A Shropshire Lad, conjuring as it does images of a cloth-capped teen in tweed plus-fours wheeling an iron bicycle up a narrow country lane. But Housman's work, in its way, was as unrelentingly grim an essay on the waste of life as is Ellroy's: a sort of grim inversion of a carpe diem where the moral is "don't lie a-bed, lad - get up and get out there ... But, come to think of it, while you're hard at it fighting Boers and so forth, most likely your best mate will be busily stealing your sweetheart away".
Now there is a "lad" herein - Don Crutchfield - who in his ascribed habits and history (a small time private eye with a missing mother and a penchant for popping pills and peeping windows) bears no small resemblance to a certain J Ellroy (as revealed in the autobiographical My Dark Places), so you do wonder whether the title and character are some sort of note to self.
In any case it's an extraordinary note. Without a doubt one of the best books of the decade.
Olly Buxton
Summary of Blood's A Rover
Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover?s pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover?s racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow?ex-cop and heroin runner?is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan?and each of them will pay ?a dear and savage price to live History.?
Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it?our recent past razed and fully reconstructed?Blood?s A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009: James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet novels chronicled a cynic's take on Los Angeles cops and robbers, carving a dark and creepy nook for the author in the world of crime fiction. With Blood's a Rover, Ellroy completes his Underworld USA trilogy, an epic reinvention of American history, politics, and corruption. This book comes out firing: Ellroy's hipster prose--inimitable for its high style and spectacular energy--snaps and surges through more than 600 pages like black electricity, shocking the gentle reader from page one. Opening with a heist scene rendered as coldly violent as anything from Sam Peckinpah's most sociopathic fantasies, the story hurls itself across an improbable crazy quilt plot, including Howard Hughes's Vegas power-play, political abuses and machinations in Hoover's FBI, and the mob's ubiquitous shadow, darkening everything from JFK's assassination to Nixon's 1968 Presidential campaign. Another audacious effort from a one-of-a-kind talent, Blood's a Rover is thrilling and exhausting, a gloriously guilty pleasure. --Jon Foro
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