Urban Waite: Sometimes the Wolf

I really liked Urban Waite's first novel, The Terror of Living. It's a tough crime novel, a bit reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, but standing still very much on its own. I haven't read Waite's second novel, The Carrion of Birds, but I happened to pick up his third novel, Sometimes the Wolf, not long ago, and now I decided to read it.

I don't know what happened. The book started out strong and well and I got the hang of it. The story about a bad cop getting out of prison possibly looking for the loot of 200,000 dollars and his son working as a sheriff in a small town felt interesting.  Then somewhere on page 150 or so I realized I didn't anymore know what was going on and what the persons were after. There had been too many days when I'd only been able to read only a few pages, and that started to show. I pushed through, since the book was well-written, but even in the end I couldn't really tell what had happened between. The ending was strong, though.

I really wanted to like this. Hell, I would've liked to know what happened in the book! I'm sure it's totally my own fault - it's been really hectic around here for some time now, and I've also done some travelling, which is never good for reading. As I said, the start of the book was really strong with interesting characters and a good plotline.

Nevertheless, next I'll pick up Waite's The Carrion of Birds. It was translated in Finnish, as was The Terror of Living, but I believe Sometimes the Wolf won't be, which is a pity.

Ridley Scott & Cormac McCarthy: The Counselor

Damn, I wanted to like this film so much! I'm not a fan of Ridley Scott's work, but I know he can do some good stuff, but given that this was scripted by Cormac McCarthy and the genre is trashy hardboiled crime I was more than thrilled when I walked in the movie theater.

Damn, it sucked.

The Counselor has lots of good moments and some nice action scenes, but there are also lots of problems. First, the plot. Mind you, I'm a fan of ellipsis. I can love the way how not everything is explained or is explained a lot later after the incident has already taken place. McCarthy as the sole writer of the film - what, no script doctors here? should've been! - uses the ellipsis clumsily and makes the film seem more awkward than it really is.

Second, the dialogue. McCarthy's dialogue works very well on paper. It works well on big screen, if it's been rewritten by real screenwriters. Take a look at No Country for Old Men or The Road. The Counselor tries to tread the same ground, but gets stuck in long monologues that have no meaning plot-wise or stupid repeating of small phrases like "What?" or "Huh?" Some of the scenes are better in this sense, however, for example the first meeting of Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender.

Third, McCarthy writes women like shit. The character of Penélope Cruz is totally meaningless. She's an empty pawn with nothing to do. Cameron Diaz is somewhat better, but she's also over-written to the extent she becomes, like Cruz, a pawn. She has no life of her own, even though that purports to be the film's focus. The men of the film are more convincing.

Fourth, how can someone like McCarthy be so demure? He writes convincingly about killing, slaying, maiming, torturing and exploiting other people, but talking about sex and giving us good sex scenes between two people - or even people talking about sex - seems to be overwhelming for him. Probably he shouldn't try it anymore and stick with killing.

If you want to have some crime fiction about Mexican drug trafficking, try Don Winslow's Savages and The Power of the Dog. Or Sam Hawken's quiet and hypnotic Juaréz Dance.

The Counselor

Here's the trailer for Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy's film The Counselor, coming next October. I'm not really that keen on Scott, but this looks kinda promising.

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy's classic western novel from 1985 has only now been translated in Finnish and I finished the translation a week back. I've already written two pieces on the book (one is available here, though it's in Finnish, understandably), so I won't have much to say about it here.

One could say that this is the antiwestern to kill all antiwesterns. Blood Meridian buries a lot of the clichés associated with the western genre under the hellish amount of dead and mutilated bodies and does it with style that's both baroque and extremely hardboiled at the same time. I really don't know how McCarthy does it. Some of the battle scenes are truly stomach-wrenching in a way that not many books are.

All this said, I must confess I'm not hundred percent sure what McCarthy wants to say with his book. Is he really saying that war and violence are inherent in all men - in all nature, even? Is the mysterious judge a spokesperson for his own values (this is quite possibly the case with the sheriff in No Country for Old Men) or is McCarthy trying to say something important, possibly something contrary to the judge's opinions? Is he just playing with the reader? You can never tell what the judge is trying to say with his long monologues.

This confusion makes for some fascinating reading, all right, but at times I wasn't exactly sure what to think of McCarthy.

Included is the photo of the Finnish edition, with the cover by Mika Tuominen. The Finnish title means "To the Edge of Blood" or something along those lines.

Urban Waite: The Terror of Living

This debut novel by the 28-year old writer made its way, rather surprisingly, into Finnish. It's a very good crime novel, reminiscent of work by Cormac McCarthy (especially No Country for Old Men) and Robert Stone, at times perhaps by Elmore and Peter Leonard. Urban Waite isn't going for comedy, though, like the Leonards at times do.

The Terror of Living is a sad novel about oldish criminals and ex-cons. There's also a young marshal, who's trying to make past wrongs right and catch the dope peddlers. There's also the Vietnamese mafia and a serial killer who's sent to find the lost drug loot. There are some very ugly moments, but the over-all effect is melancholic and lonely. Waite's people are lost in remote landscapes and trying to grasp each other and failing to do so. Comes quite highly recommended.

The Finnish title is Pelon rajalla (On the Border of Fear or some such). Thanks very much for Karisto for publishing the translation! I'm a bit afraid the book will be lost amidst all the Scandinavian megabores and other superthrillers.

Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men

It is rather dubious to write something about you've read a month ago, right? But I'm still doing it. I read Cormac McCarthy's great novel No Country For Old Men during the Christmas holidays, but the book still lingers in my mind, so I thought I'd try to get away with it. (And I know, I know, this is a very bad and not very intriguing way to start a blog post...)

As everyone reading this blog knows, the Coen brothers' equally great movie was made from McCarthy's novel. I can't think of many other examples where the mastery of cinema is as evident as in this film. Every scene, every cut, every camera move is necessary. Nothing is wasted, nothing is there for vain.

Same goes for McCarthy's narration and prose style. It's very clipped, without the quotation marks and parentheses. It works miraculously well, even though it's very elliptical at times. (There's one scene in which I think I caught McCarthy for using unnecessary words and commenting what the person in the scene was doing as an omniscient narrator.) This is what "hardboiled" was invented to mean.

Yet, McCarthy is one the of the US Nobel prize candidates. He writes dirty, mean and lean books about criminals and what havoc they bring on the world. Why doesn't Elmore Leonard can't be the candidate for the Nobel as well?

I'm not saying that there are no hidden depths in Leonard's books, but in McCarthy there sure are. I remember talking with my dad about the Coens' film and he said he couldn't find anything to say about it, even though he thought the film was very well made. It's very easy to say that the film - and the book - are about the disappearing world in which people still respected each other. This is brought out by the sheriff's monologues throughout the book and the film. It's also easy to believe this is the view McCarthy himself has. But I don't believe this is correct. McCarthy asks us to look into our easy nostalgia and ask ourselves if things really were better in the past. There are not many hints into this theme, but - as a liberal European, of course - one of those things was that the sheriff talks against abortion. He thinks it's degrading, but to my mind it's a sign of useless clinging to the past.

You might want to compare what the sheriff is saying to the charismatic killer's speeches he keeps just before he kills his victims. He's eloquent and says beautiful things about how people waste their life. In fact he's not saying anything. It's just bubbles, something a salesman or a consult might say to a customer he's never met before. He lures us to think he's got something meaningful to say. The killer is just one of those self-help demagogues that fill the bookshops with an endless row of books about - nothing. In this way, he's a prophet of the coming times and as such even scarier than he is as a killer. (Even though Chigurh is one of the scariest motherfuckers in the pages of any book.)

In the end of the book, the sheriff sees a dream about his father, himself also a sheriff. In the dream, the father rides on a horse to shine a light to a distant darkness. It's not easy to see what McCarthy has in mind in this scene, but it probably has to do with this notion: whatever we do, we must not lose hope. Someone has to cast a light in the darkness that's also called life. It's just that we have to put our hope also in the hands of those whose values we don't share. The life is scary and we can't do anything about that.

PS. It's said that the Coens' film is very faithful to the book. Yet I couldn't find the scene from the film in which  Josh Brolin shoots a dog chasing him in the book. Can anyone confirm it's not in the book? 


PPS. I'm posting this on Friday, but this is not a part of the Friday's Forgotten Book series, hosted this week on this blog.

John Hillcoat's The Road

For once I had a chance to go to movies last Sunday. I picked John Hillcoat's The Road, thinking it was by the Coen brothers - perhaps they'd've made another Cormac McCarthy film? But no, I remembered the real director when I got to the movie theatre.

I didn't mind, since the film was excellent. The postapocalyptic scenes were so overwhelmingly desolate and grey, almost without colours, I was on the verge of bursting into tears almost throughout the movie. I also thought the usual problem with road movies - there's not enough tension in what happens with everything just taking place one scene after another - was largely gone. This was a very exciting movie.

There were some scenes that were a bit too sentimental, and I didn't find the ending totally satisfying, but there was also a twist that set everything seen before it in a new light and gave it another level of meaning. I was worried for a minute, though, that this might become a cult classic for some extremists who think a new nation can be built upon total destruction (à la The Turner Diaries), but then again they would be idiots. (Has never stopped anyone before, has it, though?)

This got worse reviews than it really deserved. I'm sure it will be recognized as an American classic in ten or twenty years.

And would someone please publish a Finnish translation of McCarthy's Blood Meridian?