Blood's A Rover [Paperback]

I never doubted that 'Bloods a Rover' would be a majestic novel based on my universal admiration of everything Ellroy has written. I was, however, uncertain as to what kind of ride it would be.

At first I reached page 250 and felt things were going the way of the previous book, 'The Cold Six Thousand', with the plot becoming ever more complex, almost to the point of confusion. So I stuck a second bookmark in at the beginning and skimmed over those first 250 pages again in order to familiarise myself with the array of characters and their intertwined relationships.

Whereas 'American Tabloid' built to the inevitable conclusion of JFK's death, 'Bloods a Rover' focuses more on its own plot and stoyline, but once again using real life events and characters such as Richard Nixon to add weight to the story. Ellroy's nefarious depiction of Nixon is entirely believable given Tricky's reputation and there are a few subtle hints towards the impending Watergate break in.

The real power behind this novel has been the interplay between the main protagonists, with female characters more to the fore in this book than any previous Ellroy novel. The characters are as cold and calculating as ever as they engage in their dodgy dealings and machinations, except this time there is also a strong focus on relationships and in one case, a characters desperation to prove himself as a major player. His journey is the most fascinating, especially as the cards fall all around him during the course of the novel.

I've heard people complain about how Ellroy jumps from one person to the next and this is certainly the case, along with multiple location changes, from Haiti to L.A and Vegas. But given the time frame of several years that the book covers and the scope of its multi-faceted plot, such jumps are inevitable and dare I say it, realistic. This isn't a small book about a simple crime - it's noir at the deepest level, deep in the underbelly of the American underworld, both political and criminal.

After page 250 things coasted along at a frenetic pace and whilst the writing was powerful, I was in the dark as to how the book would conclude. It couldn't end with a whimper and the first indication that it wouldn't came at chapter 115. The book is laid out in small chapters and this particular one was white hot. You could feel the tension of the scenario and then its sudden, fiery conclusion. I gasped out load and had to put the book down for five minutes to absorb the power of this moment. When I returned to it, there was an even more shocking chapter that affirmed my belief in Ellroy and assured me that this book was indeed a masterpiece.

But as with any Ellroy book, once he starts he doesn't let go. A subsequent chapter detailed some previous history behind two of the characters and in doing so, the wider plot suddenly became clearer. What had initially seemed complex at page 250 was now crystal clear and I couldn't help but marvel at Ellroy's ability to write a novel of such scope.

Ellroy is a polarising writer. To some, he is either genius or fairly close to it; to others, he is an overrated, macho mysoginist. This book really won't de-polarise his work - you'll either really like it, or never get past page 50.

Put me as one of the fans although, in this particular book, with reservations. Firstly, the good points. For supporters of Ellroy's ripcord dialogue, the twists and turns of a Herculean-scale plot, political and criminal scullduggery, and a taut, abbreviated narrative style - this is pretty much what you were waiting for. Though Ellroy claims to have toned down his narrative style, for much of the book you'll see this as the continuation of The Cold Six Thousand that it is. If you're a fan, enjoy yourself. Ellroy delivers the riffs, outrageous dialogue, infusion of rancid details and matter-of-fact brutality that you have a right to expect for your money.

However, while I hugely enjoyed the book, for me it falls short of the other two books in the trilogy. The plot lacks the urgency and momentum of a race towards a key event. As such, the travails and stresses of the characters appear to lack some direction - people fly across the USA and the Caribbean without having a defining purpose to doing so. In addition, some of the characters are almost interchangeable - Dwight and Wayne are not so very different in many respects, and so blend rather than spark off each other. Neither are a Pete Bondurant.

In this book, Ellroy has mellowed his style and approach slightly, with two key characters being women, and with almost an upbeat ending. Perhaps it is his way of signing off from his impressive oeuvre, or signalling changes in his own life. For me, it doesn't fully work. His female characters reflect a left-wing ideology that he can never quite climb inside; they feel like caricatures of left-wingism, and lack the depth, nuance or gradiations of other main characters; their justifications and explanations do not ring true.
Perhaps Ellroy can't really do women, unless they're sassy right-wingers like Barb, or unless he is over-eulogising them.

Overall, this is a monumental piece of work, and the trilogy remains a massive achievement. But for me, this book lacks the necessary attack, drive and ultimate kick that made the previous books such a glory. It feels - not just in terms of completing a trilogy - like the end of an era.

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