No game for knights

Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, introduced in The Big Sleep, has defined all private detectives in fiction.

Trench-coated masculinity: Humphrey Bogart and
Lauren Bacall in the film version of The Big Sleep

“The most durable thing in writing is style and style is the most important investment a writer can make with his time,” said novelist Raymond Chandler and certainly he practised what he preached. His 1939 novel The Big Sleep, the first — though certainly not the last — of his that I have read is so steeped in style that it crackles. Having tried his hand, with varying degrees of lack of success, at the civil service, journalism, stringing tennis racquets, picking fruit and book-keeping, Chandler turned to writing private detective stories for pulp magazines and after six years of maturing produced The Big Sleep. With that he created the archetypal private detective in Philip Marlowe, who along with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, has defined all private detectives produced in fiction since. All the cool, laconic, tough men with an often surprising sense of right and wrong; to the extent that even Ian Fleming can be counted among his admirers.

Set in Los Angeles of the 1930s, The Big Sleep depicts a dark and uncertain world, a world of pornographers and gamblers, operating under the protective eye of crooked law officers, a world of blackmail, double-crossing and killing. And of course, blondes. (A famous Chandler quote: “I do a lot of research- particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.”) A corrupt, morally decayed world where love rings hollow and glamour only hides ugliness. Into such a world steps the “painfully” honest, hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe, with his eagle eye and somewhat anachronistic sense of ethics.

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The long way home

Conversations and people can convey more about a place than several turgid paragraphs and Seth knows this well.

The other day in the hills I rose, after many years, to the sound of a cock crowing. Compared to the metallic, penetrating cell phone alarm that is the gift of technology to us, the cock-crow was sweet music. And the cloud had rolled up right to the large glass window, swallowing the heart-numbing sight of several half-built houses, gouged hillsides and handsome pines felled while asleep.

For a moment, I was once again the teenager of a lifetime away, treading lightly with the goats from the little village of Ani where the young and vigorous Sutlej rushed under a narrow bridge, to the village of Khanag, hidden high up among the conifers. Leaving the crystal-clear stream with its churning water-mills, we began the climb upwards, lunching against large rocks on parathas and mango pickle, when the cloud rolled down, like some lazy white pillow, from the mountain crest and covered everything in sight with a thin magical haze. It was the same sort of cloud again and holding on to the vision, I began to scour my shelves for travel books once again, books that would talk of unknown roads, open starlit skies, trains whistling in the dark...

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In the twilight zone with Coetzee

What it's like to delve into the heart of darkness with a great author…

I have just read two books by J.M.Coetzee in quick succession and I wonder how long it will be before I can pick up a book by another author and not fling it away as meaningless. I know that I will recover and the spell that Coetzee has created will pass; in time the whirlwind will die down, the mind will stop trying to hold on to phantom images floating in the half-light or to find rational answers to questions that are not meant to have any answers.

But for the moment, I drift with Coetzee in the twilight zone — somewhere between life and death, between the known and the unknown, between certainty and doubt.

Led by Dostoevsky

In the first of the two books, The Master of Petersburg, one is led there by none other than Dostoevsky himself, who has, in this imagined episode, been called back to Petersburg from Dresden by the death of his stepson. Petersburg was never just another city to Russian writers. Gogol portrayed it as the capital of alienation, illusion and deception in his soul crushing Tales of Petersburg, a city where human greed and vanity ruled supreme. And Dostoevsky, credited with saying that the whole of Russian literature came out of Gogol's Overcoat, added a dimension of fantasy to the city. In the fevered imagination of his characters, it became a fog-bound city of hallucinations, visions and dreams; its long summer daylight could not only enchant but also play havoc on sleepless minds and tortured nerves.

In Coetzee's novel, the ghostly visions of this city are always at hand as Dostoevsky struggles to come to terms with the death of his stepson, in the process entering headlong into unexpected political intrigue and conflict. He takes over the room where his son lodged and forges ambiguous relationships with the landlady and her young daughter, to whom his son was not just a lodger but a hero, a revolutionary in the making, a man recovering from a lost childhood, even from a selfish step-father.

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