Three Chords And The Truth

a post from last year...
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When I first started reading the novels of James Lee Burke, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurty, Daniel Woodrell, Carson McCullers and William Faulkner it didn't initially occur to me how strange it was that I understood all the dialect words. Burke and McMurty's great westerns and McCarthy's early books set in rural Tennessee often used such Ulster Scots colloquialisms as "sleekit," "skitter," "shite," "piece," (for bread or a snack) "wean," "fixin," "crittur," etc. all of which were very familiar to me growing up in Northern Ireland. Later I understood why this was so. Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee books in particular paint a vivid picture of the Ulster Scots migrants to Appalachia and the world they live in: clannish, violent, musical, economically poor but culturally rich. I liked the fact too that these novelists wrote about blue collar working people (an increasingly rare phenomenon in American literary culture). The Ulster Scots (or Scotch Irish if you prefer) migrated from northern Ireland to America in the eighteenth century taking their customs, dialect, poetry and especially their fiddles with them. It's been well said that America's greatest contribution to world culture has been its music. African Americans invented Jazz, Blues, R&B and Rap, but the Ulster Scots invented country music or rather country music grew organically from their preexisting folk music and country music has a largely pessimistic outlook on the universe that comes from the bleak, fatalistic folkways of the Ulster Scots.
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Too few people realise that the history of the Irish in America does not begin with the potato famine but goes back a century earlier to the 1740 migrations from Ulster. The best book about this hidden history is probably Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, but Senator Jim Webb has written an entertaining primer called Born Fighting, both of which are well worth a read. Part of Jim Webb's premise is that the Ulster Scots' fighting and a feuding ways meant that they were predisposed for military service and that Scotch-Irish officers were the backbone of Washington's Army, the Union and Confederate Armies in the Civil War, the Doughboys of WW1, the GIs of WW2 and Vietnam. There may be some truth in this. Although I've never had any desire to serve in the army (all that shouting puts me right off) my dad was in the Royal Navy for twenty years and my grandfather fought in the trenches in WW1 for the duration. And of course it's well known that the British peacetime army was largely made up of Irish and Scots. Biology and culture are not destiny but maybe this is why I write (fairly) violent crime novels, not romance fiction. Mercifully though all the country songs I wrote as a teenager have gone to that great storage locker in the sky.

10 Novels For Men

Men don’t buy novels anymore. They’ve pretty much stopped buying magazines and they don’t go to the cinema in as big numbers as they used to. What do they do? The answer is that nobody knows. Advertisers don’t know. TV programmers don’t know. Publishers certainly don’t know. Probably they’re playing Halo online, watching Louis CK videos on YouTube and googling for free pornography, but we can’t be certain.

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In my local Borders they have a "Guy Lit." section which contains thrillers by ex SAS men, alternative histories where the Nazis win the war and Nick Hornby novels...Is there a middle ground between the SS jackboot and the lime green Converse high top? Yes, I think so. Here’s my list of 10 novels for men who don’t normally like to read novels. Each one has the advantage of giving you a passport into a genre or an author that will keep you going for a while.


10. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler. It’s raining in Bay City (Santa Monica) and the slick streets are thick with ironic private eyes - the most poetic and interesting of them is a guy called Philip Marlowe.
9. Use of Weapons - Iain Banks. A crazy, violent space opera set in Banks’s Culture universe. A dude called Zakalwe is a major league bad ass with a power suit and a big gun. Havoc ensues pretty much all the time. At one point he gets his head chopped off by a bunch of insane cannibals. He survives.
8. In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck. Commie agents in 30's California get the living shite knocked out of them as they lay the groundwork for revolution. This is a book to make Glenn Beck keek his whips and cry into his pillow. Nobody reads this anymore. Shame because its awesome.
8. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway. A romantic (but in a manly Hemingwayesque way) American ambulance driver falls in love with war and then a nurse. He falls out of love with the former when he quickly sees how bloody horrible WWI actually is. All the way through you're thinking, this isn't going to end well...Unlike For Whom The Bell Tolls no one gets called "my little rabbit".
7. The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse. Zen master Jeeves keeps his upper lip intact even in the most trying of circumstances. You think Snoop Dogg’s laid back? Jeeves would out limbo that mother any day of the week were he so vulgar as to engage in any kind of stick based contest.
6. The Ipcress File - Len Deighton. Harry Palmer is a spy, a gourmand, he counts his coppers, lives in a flat, flies to America and watches an H bomb test (they couldnt afford to put that bit in the movie).
5. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy. It’s basically the Wizard of Oz retold with J Edgar Hoover as the Wicked Witch of the East and with Dorothy blowing her brains out at the end.
4. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen. You know those Irish tourist board ads featuring sandy beaches, jolly times in pubs, pints of Guinness with shamrocks on them? Well Ken Bruen doesn’t write about any of that bollocks. He writes about smart crooks who know that there are many many uses for a good ten pound hammer.
3. Moby Dick - They’ve taken a three year passage on board a leaky nineteenth century whaling ship with a mad captain, dangerous harpoonists and the heavy hand of fate hanging over them. Let’s see the Sea Shepherds try their water hoses on these bad boys.
2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Its WW2 through the eyes of Captain Yossarian a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who has become the bombardier on a B17. He has to laugh otherwise he will cry and cry. Ou sont les Snowdens d'antan?
1. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy. Gun battles and horrific slaughter in the old west and Mexico. You'll try and get the wedding party massacre out of your head for the rest of your life. You wont succeed. McCarthy’s masterpiece.

It's an LA Thing: Pynchon, Ellroy & Philip K Dick

In the early 1970's James Ellroy, Thomas Pynchon and Philip K Dick were all living within a few miles of each other in Greater Los Angeles. Ellroy was a 23 year old kid beginning his first experiments with writing, Pynchon was 34 and editing the book which would become Gravity's Rainbow and Dick at 42 was reaching his peak as a novelist, having the experiences and working on the book which would become A Scanner Darkly. There must have been something about that time and place because - joining Scanner - we've now gotten Pynchon's version of events in Inherent Vice and Ellroy's take in Blood's A Rover and they all seem to share certain thematic unities: pandemic drug use, paranoia, corrupt LAPD officers, belief in government conspiracies, supreme disillusionment with politics, and, in the case of Ellroy and Pynchon, an odd obsession with Las Vegas and Howard Hughes. The overriding impression you get from these novels is that America as an ideal has reached a dead end here at the edge of the continent among the wastrels, drug dealers, dreamers and movie stars. And it might even go deeper than that - not only has America failed, but the whole enlightenment project has failed. The modern world is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed; democracy has no future - you either have total license or total tyranny and the proponents of these extremes are shrill and crazy.

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But that just may be Los Angeles. Don't get me wrong, I like LA. Fat Burger and Santa Monica and Malibu Creek are worth the drive, but I don't think you could have written Rover, Scanner or Vice in New England where people are not known for their demonstrative or hyperbolic nature. William Faulkner tells a story about how he was driving in Maine once and asked for directions. "Can you get to X, from here?" Faulkner wondered. "Yes." a local farmer responded. "Thanks," Faulkner said and off he drove before finding that the road he was on ended in the middle of nowhere. He drove back and encountered the farmer again. "I thought you said I could get to X from here," he wondered. "Not on this road," the farmer told him. Faulkner claims that he was impressed by the Mainer's precise answer to his question. In Mississippi they would have gone out of their way to show you the right road, but that was unnecessarily verbose in Maine.

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I have to say, although Faulkner was subtly dissing the north east, I really like it up there: people keep to themselves, they're suspicious of authority and innovation and they don't fall easily for the latest trends. Perhaps in the Los Angeles of 1971 America's future seemed bleak - as it does today - but drive up to New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine (and many other places in the heartland I'll bet) and you'll see a landscape and culture unchanged in nearly four centuries and a hardy, skeptical people who are not afraid of the future and who can handle just about anything.

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(Except maybe the terrible circumstances of another novel I read recently - Cormac McCarthy's The Road. )

On The Road Again

With the Australian release this week of the new Cormac McCarthy film The Road, I thought I would re-repost my review of the book from January of last year....

You always know how a Cormac McCarthy novel is going to end. The strong man will vanquish the weak man. The man more versed in knife fighting will best the novice. The man with the shotgun bandoleer will save the child of the man armed only with an empty pistol. The bald headed immortal will kill the illiterate wastrel who is the witness to his crimes. And it's always men doing the killing. Women seldom appear and when they do they're usually doing the dying or being fought over like heroines of the silent screen.
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I've been reading Cormac McCarthy since the 1980's when I discovered Child of God in high school. I tore through his Tennessee novels and his Texas novels and his crime novel and at the weekend I finished his science fiction novel The Road. I've had misgivings about McCarthy's plots before (I've never liked the scene where they make gunpowder in Blood Meridian) but never about his prose. McCarthy writes as though its the 1640's and he's a pamphleteer warning a nervous populace that the apocalypse is imminent. His words are careful, atavistic, beautiful. His sentences are as crisp as haiku, his chapters as epic as Miltonian books.
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The Road begins seven or eight years after a comet has struck the Earth. Society everywhere has collapsed. Chaos reigns. And by chaos I mean cannibalism, slavery, murder, rape; the only organisation that seems to exist in this entropic, Hobbesian war of all against all is from isolated bands of anarchists who may or may not be benign. Into a wasted landscape (where photosynthesis has ceased and most animal phyla are extinct) a man and a boy are heading south before the brutal winter comes. The man can barely keep going, but he has to as the boy's mother has cut her throat in despair not too long before the book begins. The weak mother has failed her child but the resourceful father will not give up. In wonderful scenes he finds hidden springs, apples from an orchard, an old can of Coke and fuel for a fire. He gives everything to the boy and they dodge marauders and enslavers and those terrifying cannibals.
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The story is as harrowing as any Cormac McCarthy novel since Outer Dark but the prose is just as carefully wrought as his previous works. McCarthy thinks long and hard about how a word will sound in a sentence and if the word doesn't quite work he'll find a better one. I listened to The Road as an audiobook and there were times when it was like being privy to some secret ceremony in which magic spells were being chanted for my ears alone. Often the book would get too much and I'd have to unplug my iPod and listen to the silence for a while.
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Having said that though, I knew how the story was going to finish - though it (spoiler alert) turned out to be the Far From the Madding Crowd in McCarthy's rather Hardyesque universe. And of course all of my problems with McCarthy the artist are still there. The urban is disdained, the rural worshipped, women in The Road are the strange, enfeebled creatures beloved of patriarchal religion, while the male lead is the strong, silent type who - of course - is good with his hands. Mussolini would have enjoyed this book and doubtless The Road is a best seller among survivalists. No, Mussolini isn't quite the person I'm looking for. Nietzsche is closer to the mark - the great German prose stylist par excellence who also dismissed women, townies, the weak and people who talked too much; McCarthy - in a different branch of Germanic - treads through similar terrain. Although he's probably America's greatest living novelist with more poetic depth, lyricism and psychological insight than his contemporaries, his adulation of strength does get a bit wearisome after a while and I can't even imagine what the poor love thinks of a film like Brokeback Mountain. I do recommend The Road (and the other McCarthy novels) but I was quite relieved when it was over and as an antidote I watched Annie Hall - there the guy doesn't quite win either, but he doesn't have to hit anyone to show that he's a man; and he's funny.