Blood's a Rover

With Spring busily springing and the ice gradually thawing from our hair and the feeling coming back to our fingers and toes, it would, perhaps, behoove us to recommend something of a bright and cheerful nature to our readers, something warm and sparkly and happy and such. Well, maybe next time.

Blood’s A Rover is the third book in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, which has charted the dark and murky underbelly of American history, from JFK to Nixon. The current volume brings us up to the seventies on a wave of drugs, racism, violence and corruption on a massive scale. Ellroy pulls no punches and spares no sacred cows. Everyone’s dirty, everyone’s scamming and nobody’s innocent.

Dwight Holly, Wayne Tedrow Jnr and Don show more Crutchfield are Ellroy’s damaged, morally compromised antiheroes, charting a course between the depraved paranoia of J Edgar Hoover, the insane profligacy of Howard Hughes and the scheming unctuousness of Richard Nixon. While working to build mob-financed casinos in the Dominican Republic, the must also engage in a clandestine race war, targeting black power organisations in Los Angeles. They find themselves drawn to women on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and these obsessions spell their doom.

Epic in scope, relentlessly paced and written in terse, pared down, hard-boiled staccato sentences, this is a hyped-up, pumped-up journey through a vision of social and personal damnation, which will be immensely satisfying to readers of previous volumes. New readers may want to go back to American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, though be aware that the middle volume is also the weakest of the three.

So yes, it’s grim and violent and straddles the line between unflinching realism and outright voyeurism, but

it’s also a hell of a thriller that will glue itself to your eyeballs. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it took me months to get through the first half or two thirds; on the other, the final sections sped past because everything suddenly clicked. It took a while to readjust to Ellroy's clipped writing style, but it worked well for the most dramatic moments. I was tempted to DNF after a hundred pages, and again after nearly three hundred; I'm glad I stuck with it as it means finishing the trilogy, but if I return to Ellroy in the future, it will be to go back over some of his earlier work before the style took over.

Fairly disappointing Ellroy. Still an exhilirating ride, but the pay-off was very unsatisfying. This is the conclusion to his American Tabloid trilogy. The first part was based around the assassination of JFK, and the second around those of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Ellroy, justifiably, decided not to cover the Watergate scandal in the third volume, but that left no comparable historic events to anchor this book, making it feel a far less significant work. This sadly drags down the two preceding tomes by association and leads to the question of whether he should have bothered making the series into a trilogy.

All of the major mysteries - set up in the early part of the book, and driving much of the plot throughout - fizzle show more out into perfunctory and largely unbelievable (even by Ellroy standards) conclusions. It really felt like he hadn't plotted the book fully enough and ended up writing himself into a corner. If he had been using them just to drive along the plot he really shouldn't have built them up so much.

It's a shame, because the Ellroy roller-coaster or misanthropy does still deliver. And he has curbed some of his more annoying tics, while maintaining his kinetic, punchy prose. His conflicted and compromised anti-heroes are still compelling (although his propensity to kill his characters off - while admirably shocking - does mean that you feel seen his archetypes several times before), and the hallucinatory passages, particularly in Haiti, are immersive. He still delivers a convincing vision of a familiar world refracted through a prism of violence, fear and hate. Perhaps best of all, he introduces a young and ingenuous (as far as an Ellroy character can be) character that seems to have a lot of the young and wayward Ellroy, and hence feels particularly believable. I would like to read more about him.

Unfortunately, by the end of what should have been the crowning work of an impressive and challenging trilogy, I felt that Ellroy had over-indulged himself, and perhaps believed his own hype a little too much. show less

In the past, I've enjoyed Ellroy's writing. I've read this trilogy with an increasing sense of disappointment each step of the way. The conspiracy theories behind these novels are derivative and tired. The characters unlikable and unlikely. The language, more and more, a kind of faux-gritty ("so contrived, it's hyper-real!" we hear the announcer bark) that achieves a level of unintended humor in this last novel. Though it's not even funny for long.

Ellroy's writing now seems to come out of a place where Ellroy says he knows what's real, he knows the truth behind the illusion. He knows how people really live & talk & how the big events really come down.

But the sad truth behind these books is that what Ellroy really knows is a very little, show more very circumscribed world akin to a masturbatory fantasy. And he knows that some people will be sucker enough to buy into it. Sad. show less

This is the third volume of Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy, in which historical figures from mid-20th century America mix with fictional characters to give us an inside look at dirty politics, corrupt law officers, and the criminal underworld (Mafia). I loved the first volume, American Tabloid, which took us through the assassination of JFK in Dallas in November 1963. Volume 2, The Cold Six Thousand began in Dallas on the day of JFK's assassination, and brought us through the 1968 assassinations of RFK and MLK. I also liked the second volume, in which many of the same characters from the first book carried through. There's lots about the Vietnam War, LBJ, drugs, the Mafia moving on Las Vegas, and Howard Hughes also making a move on Las show more Vegas.

This final volume begins with the RFK assassination, brings us through the 1968 election of Nixon, continues on with the activities of the Mafia, as well as the decline and corruption of J. Edgar Hoover, and ends as Watergate is beginning. However, I didn't like this one as much as the first two. It seemed more scattered and less focused, and either I began to tire of Ellroy's staccato prose, or it wasn't as compelling as in the first two volumes. In fact, the only reason I kept reading is because the book began with the brutal heist of an armored car, and the failed attempts to solve that crime constitute a sort of leit motif throughout the novel. I kept reading because I wanted answers regarding that crime.

Overall, I highly, highly recommend American Tabloid and also recommend The Cold Six Thousand. Read this one only if you are a completist.

2 1/2 stars show less

Found this secondhand and hadn't read the previous two books, so I was a bit lost at first, but this still definitely works as a standalone novel. Can't really say much more without having read the rest of the trilogy, but to my mind this was very different to the Ellroy I've read before, with a lot more in the way of international intrigue, conspiracy, sorcery and general political skullduggery, whilst still oozing noir attitude and immersing you in the dank underbellies of the cities it's set in - primarily LA, but there are some more exotic locales as well.

Might shock or open a few wounds for some readers, given its basis in modern history and its utter refusal to pull any punches as far as I could see, but for those who can stomach show more all that it's an interesting read on multiple levels. show less