UK HB has not picked up in the way that I had hoped it would.
So, to give a kick-start, I have been moved by an article in
today's Guardian to pen something that may be of interest.
The article is by Jake Arnott and concerns the film of Graham
Greene's Brighton Rock, both of which should be of interest
to Avians.
It is timely, in that I was going to try and start a
discussion on Greene as a possible HB writer. It would not be
hard work to draw a line from Conrad through Greene that
ended up at Le Carre - both Greene and Le Carre had
characters featured in our recent HB top 100 characters; both
are quintissentailly British authors and neither is, in my
opinion hard boiled. I love the pair of 'em tho.
Arnott is one of the current darlings of the UK crime scene
and author of, The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers, both of
which have caused a stir. I must admit to only having read
The Long Firm. I hate it.
A lazy attempt to rewrite the 60s regime of the Krays as
interesting, poorly researched, almost entirely aimed at an
audience with less than a nodding aquaintance with the
subject matter he handles and populated not by characters but
by cyphers - usually thinly rewritten pen-sketches of well
known figures of the 1960s London scene - weighed down by the
determinist bullshit Arnott heaps on them. Despite fantastic
police corruption, government corruption,
show-business/gangster interaction in the real history of the
time - painted over with a thin sheen of journalistic and
psychological bollocks - Arnott even manages to fuck up the
timing of the novel. That being said, it was his first. I
have a personal interest in the history of that era and
particularly one character, Joe Meek, who comes from my home
town and many of who's family I know. I have not read He
Kills Coppers.
In today's paper Arnott starts well. I must admit that I
cannot consider Greene, or Le Carre, his heir, as hard
boiled. But, there is within them what drew me to the genre.
Just as Jim Thompson is described as the dime store
Dostoyevsky, so, they too, have written work that is the
public school, university, English Dostoyevsky. Deeply
pessimistic/realistic, living characters examined to within
an inch of their fictional lives.
This article should be on-line, at www.guardian.co.uk, by the
way. Most of you, I hope, will have read the masterful
Brighton Rock, if not try and do so. I prefer, and voted for
the teenaged assasin of Greene's This Gun For Hire/Gun For
Sale, Raven, in the top 100 chacters' vote. I love Brighton
Rock but find a bit overwrought, also, a novel too personally
tied to Greene's Catholicism.
I don't quite understand Arnott's annoyance that fee-paying
school, Oxford college, National aristoocratically owned
newspaper sub Greene should not produce a "real" criminal in
Pinkie. There is also, I am sad to say, a cultural cringe and
a deep misunderstanding of what the best of the genre
is
(to me) about.
This is a quote.
"He [Pinkie] is archetypal of the small-time nastiness of
English criminality but also predicts future manifestations
of home grown youth culture. Strangely he prefigures American
icons of juvenile delinquency (Brando, Dean and so on). But
without their transatlantic glamour or essential
wholesomeness he never quite achieves this virile
degeneracy.
"This callow-faced rebel is not just a troubled teenager - he
is utterly nihilistic......
And........ what?
I shall now leave that one open to discussion. I have found
that nihilism is at the heart of the best of HB, I think
Thompson is, Hammer sometimes is and Chandler has his moments
too. To refer to, I am assuming, Rebel Without a Cause and On
the Waterfront as somehow more realistic expressions of
teenage rebellion..... hey? I'm gone.
However I think there is a point for discussion here here
though.
Graham Greene - genius Jake Arnott - not a genius
I dunno, do any Americans out there consider Dean or Brando
as part of the HB/nihilistic fiction story??? Soon we shall
talk Derek Raymond - a true genius, both of the genre and of
the nihilism that haunts it. It's his own fault for bringing
Dostoyevsky into it.
Yours waiting to be slated.
Colin. Evenin' All
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 22 Jul 2002 EDT