Sitting Under the Shade of the Tree: L.A. Confidential

It's time for a slight divergence from my usual sci-fi, a bit of infinite diversity in infinite combinations to spice things up. The following instalment of Sitting Under the Shade of the Tree features a hard-boiled detective thriller, James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential.

Some of you may remember that back when I rambled about The Man in the High Castle, I mentioned having previously "demolished" a James Ellroy book. That was The Big Nowhere, book two of Ellroy's LA Quartet. L.A. Confidential is book three and, in an ironic twist, the book that actually started it all for me. Allow to put things into context.

It may be common(ish) knowledge that in 1997, L.A. Confidential was adapted into a film, directed by Curtis Hanson and starring Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger and Danny DeVito. To name but a few of the names cropping up in the movie. It was here that my inevitable journey to reading the LA Quartet began. I loved the film. When I discovered it was based on a book, I decided I had to read it. I then discovered that, as aforementioned, it's book three of four and being borderline OCD, I had to read book one (The Black Dahlia) first.

Eventually, last year, I bought The Black Dahlia and then, round about the beginning(ish) of this year, my reading pile finally decreased to the point where I was able to read it. Instantly impressed and engrossed by Ellroy's writing, I went out and bought The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential. Last week, I finally finished the book I'd been building up to for so long.

Now. Enough context. Time for some substance.

To set the scene, it's Christmas 1951 in Los Angeles. Three LAPD officers are about to be set on an inevitable collision course that will shatter their lives apart - ambitious ladder-climber Sergeant Edmund Exley, brute force thug Officer Wendell "Bud" White and flash celebrity narcotics hound Sergeant Jack Vincennes. They're all caught up in Bloody Christmas, a scandal that gives the LAPD a black eye, only this is merely the start of spiral downwards for the three officers. From the ashes of Bloody Christmas comes the Nite Owl Massacre, a heinous crime that brings the three into conflict, then eventually a bizarre partnership as they peel back the layers of deception the crime is veiled in, threatening their careers and their lives in the process.

Ellroy's novels are incredibly compelling. I'm used to crime thrillers that focus on the crime, the evidence, the nail-biting cat-and-mouse game between criminals and the cops. But with Ellroy...well. His novels are pretty much a journey into the heart of darkness that resides inside these cops - usually all inevitably crooked or corruptible in some way. And these journeys, they're frakking intense. I'll admit, L.A. Confidential wasn't as intense as The Big Nowhere (that was some dark stuff right there, but no less brilliant and awesome a novel), but nonetheless, it was a compelling read, but also for the similarities to the movie. It was brilliant to see how all the actors in the movie perfectly suited the characters in the book and even more gleeful when I found lines of dialogue that I recognised from the movie. A lot of the time it was in an entirely different context, spoken by an entirely different character, but I still had a little smile and a little "Hey, I remember that".

In reference to the movie and the similarities, I think one of the most intriguing things I found in reading L.A. Confidential is how the screenwriters managed to take the source material - the third in a quadrilogy - and make a stand-alone movie from it, but still make it recognisable enough that (I imagine) fans of the book wouldn't be tearing their hair and screaming "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU PLAYING AT?" Okay, so in fairness I did the whole thing a bit backwards, movie then book, much like I did with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but I have very good reasons for that. Digression aside, I'm still impressed by the job the screenwriters did. Ellroy's book is a beautifully twisted tale and while the screenwriters couldn't fit everything in, they did a fine job of get the bare bones across, with the actors filling in the rest and making a brilliant film noir-esque journey into the corrupt heart of the 1950s Los Angeles Police Department.

So there you have it. Fans of the film, read the book. It's so much grittier and darker and sheds so much more light (ironically) on the motivations of the characters. Fans of the book, if you haven't seen it, fear not the film. It does well.

Until next time...my reading pile grows ever larger, with the entire volumes one to five of the Song of Ice and Fire series due on Wednesday. I'll have plenty of books to keep writing about.

Sitting Under the Shade of the Tree: The Man in the High Castle

Slowly but surely, my massive stack of reading material is going down. I don't think I've mentioned it before, but, well, I have quite the stack of books to get through. My burning desire to get through them quickly stems from the impending arrival, in July (barring any further delays to release), of the boxset of Volumes 1-5 of the Song of Ice and Fire series (in paperback). That's a nice stack of seven books. And I want to read my hardcover, signed copy of A Clash of Kings before the boxset arrives. So, mission to get through my stack of reading.

Now, the other day (/a week or two ago), I treated you all to my thoughts and feelings on Perdido Street Station, the largest book in my reading stack. Since then I demolished a James Ellroy novel (not to be reviewed here, alas, but maybe one day) and, not ten minutes ago, I finished The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.

I'll admit, I've only read one Philip K. Dick book before - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And it weirded me out a little. So maybe I was a little hesitant in picking up another Philip K. Dick novel. But numerous friends kept on telling me of the brilliance of The Man in the High Castle, so whenever I wandered into my local bookstore and had a browse, I picked up The Man in the High Castle, read the blurb, flicked it open and gave the first page or two a little read. Eventually, I caved - but mostly on account of the cover, a neat little hardback number in Gollancz's SF Masterworks series. And finally, on Wednesday morning while on the train to Reading to visit my friend Thief, I finally sat down to read the book properly.

So, to those uninitiated, The Man in the High Castle is set around the 1960s, (I imagine 1962, when the book was published), in a world where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II. The United States is pretty much in three parts - the Pacific States of America, administrated by Japan, the Rocky Mountain States in the middle, with the Nazi-controlled puppet state of the United States existing on the East Coast. In the Rocky Mountain States is the eponymous "Man in the High Castle", an author of a work of fiction banned by the Reich in all its territories, but popular in the PSA - a work of fiction that describes a world where Germany and Japan were on the losing side of the war.

I have to say, the world-within-a-world idea of the book being about a book that pretty much describes our world was what hooked me. I was intrigued by the post-war world that Dick described - the parallel between what happened here in reality and what is happening there in fiction. Instead of Europe being the buffer zone between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, the Rocky Mountain States are the buffer between the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany, as their former allegiance drifts apart and a Cold War scenario emerges.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, my first experience with Philip K. Dick weirded me out. Just as I imagine that sentence could in the wrong contexts, but moving on. The Man in the High Castle, while not exactly any less weird, was a different kind of weird. An extremely enjoyable kind of weird. Dick brilliantly draws together the characters, painting a broad, strange portrait of American life under Japanese rule (we only ever get to see events in San Francisco and the Rocky Mountain States - the puppet USA is mentioned, as are various political intrigues in Germany), all drifting around their daily lives and somehow becoming entangled by the book within the book. Some more so than others.

I'm reaching that awkward point of wanting to say more, but not wanting to spoil the plot. This is about where I wrap things up. My friends, for all their pestering about this book, can sit smugly knowing that they were right. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it is well, well worth reading. It's a quiet little book, not one that goes around blowing things up and screaming your face, it just gently nudges you, draws you in and  makes sure you can't put it down and have to read it in four days.

Now, on to the rest of my book pile...