The Cold Six Thousand (James Ellroy, 2001)

It grieves me to say this with regards to a James Ellroy novel, especially when said novel is actually really rather good, but I had issues with The Cold Six Thousand, a shame seeing as the Ellroy novels I've read to date have been literature gold. But The Cold Six Thousand is somewhat flawed, a fact that Ellroy himself has noted and it is a novel that he agrees was written at a bad time in his life, a fact that rubbed off in about everything of it.

Taking off immediately from American Tabloid (which I still consider to be a modern masterpiece), the surviving characters are cleaning up after the assassination of JFK. Their aim: make sure Oswald acted alone. Concurrently a cop by the name of Wayne Tedrow Jr has been paid six thousand dollars to kill a pimp who resides in Dallas (hence the cold six thousand of the title). As is the norm with Ellroy, all plot points intertwine into one epic labyrinth of a plot which goes on to include the mob's take over of Las Vegas (using swindled money from Howard Hughes) and the FBI's black-ops drug operations during the Vietnam war, all of which leads to the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

As interesting as that sounds (and there are moments of absolute brilliance to be found here) I just couldn't finish it. The first thing that strikes is the prose which is at once terse and aggressive, confrontational even. The staccato delivery has gone into overdrive here and at times it's difficult to keep up with even the simplest of things. To demonstrate, a character sitting in a bar with be explained as such: "Pete sat. Pete drank. Pete perused talent. Pete eyed niggers. Pete eyed them sloooooow". The inclusion of documentation such as letters and telephone transcripts break up the simplicity but the general style is extraordinarily difficult to get into.

Whilst I also have no problem with the inclusion of difficult material, so long as it's within the context of the material (rape, racism, etc), the tough stuff here is relentless. Ellroy is known for being moral yet pessimistic, however I found that every protagonist here was utterly repugnant, a surprise considering Ellroy's usual troupe of characters but there is not a single moral compass here to latch onto. Those that are decent end up racist and those that were horrid to begin fail to redeem themselves in anyway. Spending time with these people just made me feel dirty.

I guess there will be a soft spot for this work over time but I consider it a failure. An honourable failure but a failure non the less. It is intermittently brilliant but it's a case of allowing ones personal issues get in the way of their work.

I will leave it a while before I read anymore Ellroy. For the time being I feel The Cold Six Thousand has left me desperate for something more simplistic.

3/5

Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton, 1990)

I really enjoy it when you go back to the source material of a film you love and find that the book is majorly different. As a book, Jurassic Park is more violent, features more characters and dinosaurs and has a hell of a lot more happen. But one thing it has in common with its screen counterpart is that it is also unbearably tense at times. Shame it loses it's way in the final fifty pages.

On the back of this though, I think I can confidently say that I'm a fan of Crichton. Whilst there are some of his works that I have no interest in reading (Next, Pirates Latitudes, Eaters of the Dead), for the most part his flawed prose can be overlooked to allow the reader to go with the thrill ride he's presented. I enjoyed both Jurassic Park and Airframe equally and I am now awaiting his eco-terror novel, State of Fear, with eager anticipation.

As with Airframe, I can't help but crave thrillers like this from time to time.

4/5

Dark Winter (Andy McNab, 2003)

Again, another book I’ve put down half way through but the way I see it, unless I was at the cinema I’d generally turn off a bad movie if I wasn’t enjoying it so I’m starting to feel less guilty about not sticking with a book till the end.

Along with Chris Ryan (who was also there during the Bravo Two Zero mission), McNab has now made a lucrative career of being a thriller writer. Only problem with that (and with Ryan also) is that his works are generally not very thrilling. However, having been a few years since my last foray into the world of McNab, I thought I’d give him another go. Waste of time and effort.

Dark Winter is just extremely formulaic and not very interesting. McNab far from being a bad writer, but he’s just not able to make any of his books exciting, a major handicap for someone who makes a living from the thriller genre. But for £2, I can hardly complain about too much wasted money.

And the endless pages about weapons. Never has an author made guns so boring.

2/5

Rendezvous With Rama (Arthur C. Clarke, 1973)

David Fincher angle of Rendezvous With Rama is what intrigued me the most. The director has been toying with the idea of making an adaptation for a number of years and whilst reading it I could already see it as being his 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, despite being a truly visionary work, Rama opens with fascination yet ends with as much questions left to answer as it posed to begin with, much like the final season of Lost.

The work itself is astoundingly epic. A fifty kilometre long cylinder, codenamed “Rama”, is found floating into the perimeters of our solar system. A team of scientists are sent to investigate. What they find in side is another world fitting the dynamics of an O’Neil Cylinder, (type into google, the artist conceptions are facinating). What follows is a voyage of discovery as our heroes investigate the strange new world.

What is fascinating about this work is the logistics and the physics of having a world that occupies the circumference of a spinning cylinder. Through the centre of the craft, the gravity is zero, yet as they reach the outer rim, therefore the ground, it increases due to the spin. The science seems legit and endlessly enthralling.

However, the latter half of the book fails to live up to the initial intrigue. Once the ship comes alive, it loses its ambiguity and becomes less interesting than when the craft was effectively derelict. Whilst it remains a decent read, more avant-garde aspect of the ship’s design are never explained and at the end, it leaves never to be seen again, leaving the reader somewhat frustrated.

But it’s hard not to ignore the fascination of its set up and for that, Rendezvous With Rama is recommended. This is what I expect from a decent science fiction novel.

4/5

Thinner (Stephen King, 1984)

Basic set up: obnoxious over-weight lawyer gets off light for a hit and run accident. Unfortunately, the victim’s father, a gypsy man as hockey as you’d expect, puts a curse on our hero that will cause him to lose around three pounds a day in weight until he dies.

Simple yet wholly satisfying.

King (writing under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman) runs with the simple premise and pens a yarn that never outstays its welcome. At a mere 340 pages, it’s lean and to the point and unlike the last King book I read (the rubbish Insomnia), it doesn’t delve into pretentious waffle. King knows the idea is hockey and plays it as such whilst delivering great moments of nastiness and a wonderfully bleak ending.

Consider it a B-picture to the genuine masterpieces of King’s work.

4/5