so etwas einfallsloses gelesen, James Ellroy spult das Programm der vorher gehenden Romane der Trilogie mit neuem Personal in der NixonÄra weiter durch, mit ein bisschen Voodoo als exotischer Beilage.
Glatte Zeitverschwendung. The latest from James Ellroy finds his characters not influencing national events like they did in American Tabloid or being caught up in them like they were in The Cold Six Thousand.
Instead, theyre trying to do what feels right to them while navigating their way through the war between black militants and the FBI, mobbed up casinos in the Caribbean and a fictional armored car heist.
The big twist this book takes away from other Ellroy novels is how empowered women are throughout the whole story.
Instead of being passive objects, the women in Bloods a Rover outlie, outcheat and outmanipulate the male leads, which creates an interesting new dynamic.
To be honest, I got a little bored in The Cold Six Thousand b/c it felt too familiar, but I never had that issue with Bloods a Rover.
I think I just appreciated how much his characters evolved throughout the novel because of those new dynamics without losing the conspiracy/crime novel/mystery aspect that makes all of Ellroys book entertaining.
I just finished reading the latest James Ellroy book, "Blood's A Rover, " It's a weighty slog to get through the novel at nearlypages,
I used to be a big James Ellroy fan, Now I feel Ellroy is very much past his prime as a relevant writer, I finished the book because I wanted to see what happenedI read both the good "American Tabloid" and the terrible "The Cold Six Thousand" that preceded this hopefully last entry in the trilogyto the characters involved.
Ellroy's mostly twodimensional characters and hipster late's jargon were wearying from the beginning, If you really like Ellroy, read "White Jazz" again instead,
Ellroy substitutes what he considers "style" for substance whenever possible in "Blood's A Rover, " But since he includes characters like Nixon, J, Edgar Hoover, various famous mobstersand his main characters are responsible for the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and much more in one way or anotherhe has some built in gravitas, which he tends to squander on characters who all seem to hate either AfricanAmericans or homosexuals, or both.
Ellroy tosses so many famous characters into the blender of his revisionist historywhere they emerge as little more than caricaturesthat the tactic goes from being fun at first to just plain formulaic.
I'm a fan of sex and violence and hardboiled fiction, but "Blood's A Rover" is so persistently ugly and pointless that it just bores me after a while, from endless repetition.
The same puerile nonsense over and over,
The fascination with Communist insurgencymost of the characters either start "red" or go "red" during the book in one way or another as a reaction to the fascism of J.
Edgar Hoover and Nixon, etc, is constant in "Blood's A Rover, " Yet that red fascination destroys or disfigures all of the main characters in the end,
By the end, it's hard to care about the big "mystery" Ellroy hangs his bloated tome on this time around.
This time it's a stolen shipment of emeralds and cash, He lays out the "bad" guys' motivation in a bland chapter of exposition near the endwhich seems to me to be bad storytelling craft, pure and simple.
I think I'm going to try to return the book and get my money back, Dwight Holly and Wayne Tedrow Jnr are back from The Cold Six Thousand, joined here by wannabe spottailer and obsessional "peeper" Donald Crutchfield.
They commit the most atrocious acts, committed to a cause, then conflicted, then committed to a different cause as they circle around each other and a handful of similarly obsessional supporting cast members, all against the backdrop of postKennedy, Vietnam era America.
All the characters, regardless of whether they are cops or not, bandy about such prolix terms as "confluence", "construction", "extrapolate" and "interdicted", forming an unlikely but terrific patois completely unique to Ellroy.
The dialogue between FBI / mob henchman / lawyer Dwight Holly and J, Edgar Hoover in particular is as hilarious as ever, like a demonised version of Jeeves and Wooster,
I hadn't read an Ellroy novel for ages, having read most of his other books in a rush a few years back.
Blood's A Rover is pretty much a carbon copy of the previous two books in the Underworld USA trilogy, so I found it easy to "resituate" in Ellroy's parlance myself to his extraordinary, staccato, verbless style.
Put simply, if you
have yet to read a book by Ellroy, have a strong stomach and don't mind leaving your political correctness aside, you simply have to read this book, or any of his others.
The Demon Dog is a wicked "baaaaad" writer, There might be some spoilers, I will make sure that they pop up later in the review, Don't hit more if you don't want to see them,
The hump sucked up fear and hate wholesale, He was a stone shit magnet,
Afterplus pages in the past three weeks, slumming in the netherworld of Ellroy's vision of American history my brain has fried itself on staccato prose, excessive violence and a belief that we are all rotten to the core.
I feel complicit. I want a sap. A few throwdown pieces. I want to walk next to History, even though my mind barely survived the first brush with it.
Blood's a Rover a strange book, The story picks up where The Cold Six Thousand ends,, MLK and RFK are dead, JEH is estatic, he's also aging fast, Dracula is buying up all of Vegas and the mob is dreaming of manifest destiny for their lost casinos to the Beard.
The story begins in, temporally in the time when Dallas was being sanitized, but here on an eventful LA morning when a baaad ass armored truck robbery went down.
Convergence. Compartmental seepage. Stories running into one another, Stories melding. Muddying the waters with blood and narratives, History moves on, the characters along for the ride, running along the abyss of morality right towards the swirling meatgrinder of History.
On the surface Blood's a Rover is a continuation of the first two novels.
Surfaces lie. Appearances deceive.
A fourth book flexes its muscles, My Dark Places glides under and between the Cheltenham letters, A character reads much like Ellroy, Teenage peeper. Adolescent rebellion rebelling against the sixties with the aplomb of going too far in the other direction, A mother gone missing, an obsession of why, A weak absent father. The Devil Dog has put himself into the passenger seat of History, He names himself dipshit. He pulls the trigger on the JFK trigger man, He blows the lid off of History, He further blurs fact and fiction,
While dipshit's story moves forward other stories fall away, Where are the Boys What happened to Drac Vegas Watergate is coming, but that too falls to the side.
Los Angeles starts looming larger and larger even as the story does the frug around the country, To the Dominican Republic. To voodoo villages of Haiti, The story shifts. It recompartmentalizes. The story becomes LA. It becomes dipshit. And Joan. And Karen. The vision goes from super fucking wide lensed to myopic,
The book shifts, It feels incomplete for the American Trilogy, It jives as an epilogue for the LA Quartet,
Something is unsettling about the book as a whole, It feels like a couple of books in one, I have to remind myself that somethings happened in this novel and not in The Cold Six Thousand.
Maybe this isn't a true five star book, but the series as a whole is, and what Ellroy does in this book is his own thing.
He has created his own mythology of America, and in the end brought it all back to the city that spawned him.
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