I just finished rereading the three early Raymond Chandler novels in the fabulous Library of American edition of his work. All three show the economy of language and spot-on descriptions and metaphors that made Chandler famous and made him deserve to be. Take these two examples:”I don’t like port in hot weather, but it’s nice when they let you refuse it,” about the wealthy black widow of The High Window, or “This room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead,” from The Big Sleep. I’m not the only one who notices the delightful metaphors in the work of Chandler and other thriller writers; in Steven King’s On Writing he cites two similes: “These favorites include ‘It was darker than a carload of assholes’ (George V. Higgins) and ‘I like a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief’ (Raymond Chandler).”

Chandler still resonates. Elmore Leonard is a direct descendant of Chandler, as are most latter-day crime writers, and it’s easy to see why he was influential. He took the laconic but powerful, reluctant and heroic hero of American myth—think Natty Bumppo plunked from the forest and put in the urban jungle with a great knowledge of the human animal rather than the great outdoors and you’re thinking of Philip Marlowe—and applied him to a grimy version of Sherlock Holmes. It also can’t be a coincidence that Marlowe is just an “e” short of Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness.

Chandler isn’t the kind of crime writer Leonard briefly parodies through a character in The Hot Kid: “The sky hung as a shroud over the Bald Mountain Club, gray and unforgiving, a day that dawned with an indifferent beginning, but would end in violent deaths for twelve victims of the massacre.” We’re convinced we’re in better hands than that, as both writing and character show. Leonard’s would-be writer shows what other people do wrong, but it’s hard to define what Chandler gets right; perhaps the ease of his style, which is so swift and lean but packed with vivid, crucial details. Marlowe also makes himself likable by being a, if not the, good but tough guy in a world of deceitful and petty losers. Being good doesn’t mean being weak, and Marlowe is never the patsy, but that doesn’t make him forget his sense of decency, even if it is a decency relative that’s held against the standard of foolish and cops and the L.A. underworld that I suspect still exists today, with the same characters even if the circumstances are different. Marlowe is complex enough to be interesting, and, like the reader, more interested in the story itself and the characters he meets than where the bodies are buried. Chandler is too easy to forget—he doesn’t have the ad budget or product placement of the detective du jour—but even sixty years later he’s still a writer of power and verve.

Edit: I just posted a piece on Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in which I discuss Chandler’s influence.

The Cunning Man was the last novel Davies wrote, and it seems a fitting cap, as it deals with many of the themes and structures developed in his other fiction: the growth of the individual, the necessity of recognizing the spiritual facets of life, and maintaining a sense of proportion.

Imaginative and thematic links run through his novels, which combine to form a larger commentary on life and art—separating the two seems futile at best for Davies. His novels tend to have protagonists whose most significant exploits and understanding occur when they are well into middle age, and yet their understanding and exploits is often rooted in earlier experience. Unlike many authors, Davies eschews elevating a youthful golden era that is wistfully examined through hindsight. (A recent author I cared little for used this method). Instead, youth sets the stage for additional revelations and intelligence.

If there are a few lines that can sum up Davies’ philosophy and ideas, it’s probably the last paragraph of The Cunning Man, which I will repost here, for they are as accurate a summation of existence as any: “This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.”

He is conscious of life being a show, as my earlier post on his biography indicates, and he has a theatrical sensibilities in his novels that comes out through techniques like habitually using odd narratives devices to comment on the action; in The Cunning Man a series of epistles gives perspective The Ladies, and in The Lyre of Orpheus a dead composer caught in a kind of purgatory or limbo steps in to speak at times. Two lesser demons comment in What’s Bred in the Bone. The latter two novels, both from The Cornish Trilogy, are both theatrical to begin with and the interruptions function as a chorus, which fits well with Davies’ habit of rehabilitating the past and making it his own, even if he ends up creating unfashionable and perfectly lovely art. In Murther and Walking Spirits a man is murdered in the first sentence and his ghost narrates the rest of the novel, which mostly consists of historical scenes in a movie theater.

The contrast between later novels like Murther and The Cunning Man and Davies’ first novels shows his own growth. The Salterton Trilogy is clearly Davies’ weakest collection of novels, though the last one, A Mixture of Frailties, demonstrates increasing mastery of both form and content. Davies better expresses complex emotion and growth in A Mixture of Frailties than in the earlier two novels, which lack the control and advanced characterization; his protagonist, Monica Gall, is more of a person and less of a placeholder or type than the characters in the first two.

Davies traces Gall’s journey away from rural Canadian roots, which is a theme treated still more heavily in The Deptford Trilogy. In both parallels to his own life are evident, as he went from Canada to Oxford and back, learning much of European sophistication while retaining an essentially Canadian mindset while there. Perhaps this is why the best writing in A Mixture of Frailties comes out through the most important passages of Monica in London. But the novel still demonstrates some of the immaturity of the first two Salterton novels in the frame story surrounding the circumstances of Monica’s financing in England. The first sections surrounding the will of Mrs. Bridgetower, the passively domineering mother of newly minted professor Solly Bridgetower, portended more of strained highjinks of Tempest-Tost and Leaven of Malice. But A Mixture of Frailties swiftly transcends the weaknesses of the first once the action shifts to London because Monica is so much more real, and the events seem much more significant.

The plot is hardly new: country girl goes to the Big City (London in this case) and leaves much, but not all, of her old life behind, and in particular she discards puritanical morality in favor of the city’s mores. But the twisted morality of church and country never fully leaves her, as one can no more fully leave one’s past than leave the bonds of time. Monica falls for a genius composer whose wild and randy life she cannot fully enter, and the denouement requires some resolution of their relationship. The end is unusual, and I will that there is no marriage as there were in old-fashioned comedies and many Victorian novels, but the marriage plot that arises is delightful and natural. The ambiguous end leaves open as to whether there might be marriages later.

The Cunning Man follows the life of a doctor who synthesizes Western medicine and spiritual/indigenous ways of fighting disease. This peculiar doctor’s work helps transcend Western medicine while not bashing it. The medical plot itself, however, represents a deeper movement or growth into understanding of human beings, who the Cunning Man of the title would not acknowledge cannot be nourished by bread alone and are creatures whose heads affect their stomachs and all other parts of them. Understanding and applying that to often recalcitrant or unusual or dilatory patients that cannot be fixed by other doctors is his specialty, and in that way he acts as an advisor beyond the traditional doctor’s interest merely in the body. The last novel effectively continues the themes developed in his earlier works while expanding on them. It is the work of a master and I can only read in awe at such a performance after so many other remarkable novels.

It is not clear what we should take from The Sea, John Banville’s brooding novel about an old man looking over his life, its early parts, and his early awakening. He apparently did not use well whatever knowledge he gained through his early loves, at least based on his sometimes harsh assessment of his daughter’s life. I say harsh because his voice and tone are tinged with disappointment, but his views are not expressed harshly because he understands his daughter and why she made the choices she did, but because he recognizes his own failures in her.

Parts sing, but they cannot carry the whole, as even when they do sing they also lose the melody:

She is in my memory her own avatar. Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations. I remember Anna, our daughter Claire will remember Anna and remember me, then Claire will be gone and there will be those who remember her but not us, and that will be our final dissolution. True, there will be something of us that will remain, a fading photograph, a lock of hair, a few fingerprints, […] yet none of this will be us, what we are and were, but only the dust of the dead.

Morbid, but accurate, even if two things ring false: the “grassy bank of my recollection” is a ridiculous metaphor because there is nothing about recollections that imply a grassy bank or anything like it, and also the word “ramify”, which, though I know what it means, stuck out as a word used more because it sounds literary in an intimidating and exclusive fashion than because it is appropriate. Here it distracts from the narrative—demonstrating why it is so seldom used.

Oh, and aside from the writing, it would also be nice if The Sea were at least a little bit funny. It’s hard to be ceaselessly grim about someone who, despite being bent by regret—and possibly criminal alliteration—lived reasonably well. Do we have a right to demand heroic events and achievements? Obviously not, but it’s hard to see tragedy through Banville’s novel, though that seems his target.

I wonder if the current big deal European literature obsession with the past is actually a large trend or just most obvious in Booker winners. I’m tempted to make facile generalizations on the basis of a small subset of prize-winning works that most of the U.K. probably hasn’t read and probably hasn’t even heard of, but I’ll avoid that in favor of raising the question and then not exploring the answers to it.

At least one novel I have read, however, takes what The Sea aims for and hits the mark. Contrast it with Ian McEwan’s Atonement, a much better book dealing with similar themes but told from the perspectives of people living their lives, and the former shrivels away. Atonement deserves its big prize, as its metaphors do not strain and its language does not ascend to heights before falling off them because it’s too heavily encumbered.