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| Friday, December 12, 2008 12:33 PM |
| Book Report - The Black Dahlia |
 by Fëanor |
As I mentioned earlier, I've been reading The Black Dahlia. I finished it a week or so ago. It's really very much like a film noir detective movie transferred to the printed page, complete with all the stock elements of the genre: the femme fatale, the labyrinthine plot, and an odyssey through the sleazy underbelly of the world that leaves the main character irrevocably changed.
The story is told from the first person perspective of a rookie policeman and former boxer named Bucky Bleichert. I always do my best to sympathize with and like the main character of any book I read or movie I see (I don't deal well with unreliable narrators), but while that tactic worked for me for a little while with Bucky, it eventually failed in the latter part of the book, when Bucky's obsession with the Dahlia leads him to perform some really despicable acts.
It's very much a book about obsession and corruption, and about a woman who was at the center of both things, before and after she died. Ellroy presents the title character, Elizabeth Short, as a woman who, while alive, tried to be whatever people wanted her to be, and who, in death, succeeded beyond anything she could have imagined. To Bucky's partner, Lee Blanchard, she becomes the little sister he failed to protect; the case that, if he can crack it, will redeem his guilty conscience. To Bucky she is at first just Lee's dangerous obsession; a distraction from real police work, and not worth all the time and resources expended on her. But eventually she becomes his own secret and terrible desire. He must save her, love her, screw her, kill her himself, punish her killer. He throws everything away - his relationships, his career, almost his own life - in pursuit of the ghost of her. In a sequence with shades of Vertigo, the woman he had an affair with woos him back by dressing and acting like the Dahlia. It's a sick temptation he cannot resist.
As I said, the plot is a labyrinthine thing. Every time you think the mystery is nearly solved, it's quickly revealed that nothing is as it seemed, and there are whole new layers to the story you weren't even aware of. Subplots that seem at first to have nothing to do with the Dahlia case are suddenly pulled into her story until the whole thing is tangled together in a horrific mess of lies and sex and blood. It's a brutal story that takes you down deep into the very lowest and blackest pits of the human soul. You find yourself unable to look away from the things Ellroy shows you there. In them you see pieces of the darkness in your own heart.
Of course it's not all horror and evil. There are also many moments of (admittedly, mostly dark) humor. And Ellroy builds a really fascinating, unique, and at first pretty happy, relationship among his three main characters: Bucky, Lee, and Kay Lake.
The story is set in an almost impossibly depraved and corrupt version of late '40s LA (with a side trip to Mexico that's even more awful), where the police force is full of drug-users, murderous thugs, corrupt politicians, and the very occasional decent man, and things are only worse on the back streets and inside the expensive mansions. Real historical events are woven into the plot of the book, but this is really more of an alternate history novel, as Ellroy's characters do eventually solve the unsolved case of the Black Dahlia's murder, though the solution hardly comes as a triumph, and it remains just another hideous secret they have to bear the burden of.
With the killer finally found, Bucky finds himself wounded, but able to move on and try to start a new future for himself and Kay. It's a future built on shaky foundations, perhaps, but one that could hold up after all. The ending is surprisingly hopeful, but also hard-earned and realistic.
Ellroy's epilogue is interesting for a couple of reasons, the first being because it reveals how very personal this book is for him. When the Dahlia was killed, his parents were living only blocks away from where her body was found. Only a decade later, Ellroy's own mother would be killed, and her case would also go unsolved. It's not surprising, then, that he would have his fictional alter-ego solve the Dahlia's murder. Sex and murder and love and family are all tied up for him in an ugly little knot, and this book is his attempt to pick that knot apart.
The second interesting thing in the epilogue is the high praises Ellroy sings for the film adaptation of his book (the particular paperback printing I read was produced as a tie-in with the movie's release). He's not coy about his hope that the movie will increase sales of the novel, but he also seems to be genuinely pleased with the way the director (that being the uneven Brian De Palma) and actors have interpreted his book. Which means I might have to rent the movie now (even though I've heard bad things about it, and I don't see how it could possibly capture all the depth and complexity of the book).
The Black Dahlia is a riveting study of the human animal and its darkest desires. It's not a pleasant book, and it's not one that I'll probably ever read again. But it's an excellent piece of work. |
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