The Mobster's Lament by Ray Celestin

 

 

The Axeman’s Jazz, the first in Ray Celestin’s City Blues Quartet, won the CWA New Blood Dagger for best debut crime novel and it was a well deserved accolade. It was exciting, original, densely evocative of a fascinating time and place, suffused with the rhythms of rudimentary 1910s jazz when Louis Armstrong – a character in the book – took his first steps towards immortality. The second in the quartet, Dead Man’s Blues, picked up the same central characters a decade on, in 1920s Chicago, the era of Al Capone, the moment when, with the magnificent West End Blues, Satchmo changed jazz forever.

Now, the third in the series, The Mobster’s Lament, jumps forward to the 1940s in New York, when Charlie Bird Parker and Dizzy Gillespier were inventing bebop and jazz was preparing for its next, stunning metamorphosis.

The central pairing of Ida Davis, a private detective and a black woman who could pass for white – often, alas, a distinct advantage in those days – and Michael Talbot, a former New Orleans police chief, remain. They are older, of course, and Michael, in particular is not the man he was. Retired and his body ageing, he is no longer suited to the hectic, violent world still inhabited by Ida. Unfortunately, though, he is hurled back into it when his son is arrested and charged with four brutal – possibly voodoo-related – murders in a seedy flophouse. Michael knows he is innocent but the case against him seems watertight.

Curiously watertight.

He calls on Ida, his old friend and colleague, to assist, and they begin an investigation which takes them into the heart of 1940s gangsterdom, with passing visits to the jazz bars in which Bird and Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were beginning their experiments with the very structure of music.

A parallel plot features a Mafia fixer, Gabriel Leveson, who has a secret of his own – he has been salting away Mob money for years and has planned his imminent escape. Before he can put the plan into action, however, he too is drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse when he is ordered by a Mafia boss to track down a missing $1 million. Gradually, violently, the stories of Ida and Michael and Gabriel converge.

As always with Ray Celestin, there is a mindboggling amount of plot. You would do well to read this fast, as you will lose track of characters and events otherwise. And the other signature traits of Celestin are also present – the vivid historical detail, the periodic, very violent crime, the beautiful overlaying of the history of jazz, here told through Satchmo in his wilderness years and through the tyros setting the bebop clubs on fire.

It is perhaps fifty or sixty pages too long. There are some longeurs and repetitions and sometimes the detail becomes almost photographic, but this is a failing so many writers succumb to as their careers progress. Take virtually any writer and track the average page count from first novel to last and you see the same thing. Oh, for an editor who could take writers in hand and tell them to cut the verbiage.

But, for all that, this is a great read. Fast-paced, exciting, very well written and with characters who feel alive and vibrant, with all their failings and foibles, their strengths and their fears. Once you start, you’re unlikely to finish until the final page is turned.

The fourth and final novel is due to be set in Los Angeles in 1967. The sixties was the era when bebop was being overtaken by free jazz, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders et al. That’s my favourite jazz period and I can’t wait to read it.

Boneland by Alan Garner

 

The gestation of Boneland is now famous: it is the third and final part of a trilogy begun in 1960, with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and continued in 1963 with The Moon of Gomrath. The first two were books for children, and they were meant to be the end of the series; Boneland is an adult novel whose presence has slowly insinuated itself in the author’s mind over the intervening years. On the surface it sounds an unlikely undertaking. For fans of Alan Garner’s outstanding work, though, it is entirely natural and wholly welcome. Boneland is a book that had to wait fifty years to be written.

Weirdstone and Gomrath are superb children’s novels, among the best of the last century. Their inventiveness, their use of myth, the wonderful rolling rhythms of the language, the thrilling sense of adventure and danger and supernatural fear, all combine to produce something truly memorable. And Boneland, though far from flawless, is an extraordinary sequel: it somehow manages simultaneously to be entirely different from and wholly consistent with its predecessors. Such a contradiction would probably please the author. It is a remarkable feat.

Colin, the child protagonist of the original stories, is now a forty-something astrophysicist still living in the myth-haunted space of Alderley Edge where the earlier books (and most of Garner’s works) were set. His twin sister vanished as a child (as was suggested at the conclusion of The Moon of Gomrath). Colin is obsessed by her. He is deeply troubled, possibly bipolar, certainly subject to manic periods. He can remember every moment of his life since the age of thirteen (when the previous novels ended) but nothing at all of what happened before that age. As Boneland begins he is clearly approaching a crisis, quite possibly a total breakdown.

The narrative shifts between a straightforward and realist description of Colin’s daily life – his travails at work, his singular home lifestyle, the counselling he undertakes with the mysterious psychiatrist Meg – and a dreamscape in which myth and time and sumptuous descriptive passages meld into a breathtaking otherworld. This takes place in some pre-lapsarian existence of our earliest ancestors and yet, at the same time, one feels its centre is in Colin’s consciousness, that troubled and tormented place. There is more than one time, there is more than one story, there is more than one moment. We are taken into a Nietzschean whorl of infinite return, time cycling and recycling, never linear, never simple. We spin round our mortal realm, we reach out into the stars, probing, searching, looking for clues, but what is truly out there is too far way, too long ago, too remote for us to grasp. It is beyond. It is not, nor ever will be, us. The answers are there. The answers are nowhere.

This is the nature of the myth world into which Colin is thrust. And that we cannot – quite – grasp what is happening reflects the turmoil that Colin, too, must endure. There is a juncture where myth and history collide, and Boneland describes that space. It is a boundary, and as Colin explains: “Boundaries aren’t safe... They occupy neither space nor time. Boundaries can change apparent realities. They let things through.” These passages, then, are uncomfortable, unsettling, both unreal and hyper-real, as though the senses are operating at the edge of their experience.

Great fiction will always use the personal to explain the universal. But truly great fiction will use the universal to explain the personal. One thinks of Crime and Punishment, for example, which could not exist without the reader being aware of both the inner sensibilities of Raskolnikov and the outer, moral pressure which defeats him. Or William Golding’s Pincher Martin on his island, in his death. Or Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree in the wilderness of his imagination, balancing fears that are, at once, private and eternal, his dead twin and his dead self. In the character of Colin we have just such a conjunction of personal and universal. Through him we come to a greater understanding of humanity while, at the same time, through the novel we come to better know an individual human being. Only the great writers can achieve this. Garner is a great writer.

I’m not convinced, however, that Boneland is a great novel. In particular, Garner has some difficulty with dialogue. It seems remarkable to me that someone with such an acute sense of the rhythms and beauty of language should have such a tin ear for dialogue. One gets the feeling that, in real life, Garner may be someone who thinks a lot but wastes little time on the trivia of chitchat. And that this matters in the novel points to a second problem: by consciously writing the main narrative in realist mode, these shortcomings in dialogue become all too apparent. As Ursula Le Guin pointed out in her perceptive review, the mixture of realism and fantasy is a brave literary choice. For the most part it succeeds, and it is certainly true that the prehistoric era passages grow in weight and depth and resonance as the novel progresses, but there remains a disjunction when a writer writes in realist mode and unnatural elements such as clunky dialogue intervene. I do not know what else Garner could have done, because I believe the overall approach he takes is both brave and correct, but the dialogue remains a problem with the novel.

In the end, though, I don’t believe it matters. Boneland stands as a fine piece of literature. It takes a true and honest approach to myth, far removed from elves and dragons and childish quasi-medieval posturing. Mythology is a serious enterprise, a generations-old attempt to explain the inexplicable: who we are, why we are, where we are, when we are, how we are, what we are. This is the true nature of myth, and it is a difficult and troubling thing. Those who use myth properly write dark novels – McCarthy, Golding, Coetzee et al. They know what myth is and they know its power. When asked in Boneland about myth and science, Colin, the astrophysicist, makes the perhaps startling declaration that they may have equal validity. Each is real in its own ways but “they occupy different dimensions”. If this isn’t the message of a writer like Cormac McCarthy I don’t know what is. And it is certainly the message of Alan Garner’s work, beautiful, wise and powerful as it is.