The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1) in Never too Late to Read Classics

Jan 07, 2020 Antonomasia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, american, crime, decade-1930s, el, guardian-1000, bbc-books-shaped-our-world-2019, 2020

It was a joy to read crime fiction that wouldn't be awkward to review on GR, and which doesn't make me feel like apologising to half the review's likely readers. Most mysteries I've read since joining the site have been recent-ish Scandi noir; it was always tricky, because I have to talk to two sets of people in the same post when I actually want to say different things to each of them, and neither is too fond of the other's perspective. I might want to say those who read that sort of genre crim It was a joy to read crime fiction that wouldn't be awkward to review on GR, and which doesn't make me feel like apologising to half the review's likely readers. Most mysteries I've read since joining the site have been recent-ish Scandi noir; it was always tricky, because I have to talk to two sets of people in the same post when I actually want to say different things to each of them, and neither is too fond of the other's perspective. I might want to say those who read that sort of genre crime at least occasionally "this is well-written" by which I mean in the context of contemporary police procedurals (there are some right clunkers out there). Then there are friends who read pretty much only high-literary and experimental - if they are even bothering to read the review, which they might not anyway, but what if they do and in a few weeks or months they find themselves somewhere with only a small or mundane selection of books that includes one by this author, and they pick it up because they saw it on GR and think it's terrible? At any rate I would never recommend the book to them personally, and if I ever mentioned it to them individually I'd say, "This is fairly decent writing by the low bar of this subgenre, but you'd probably hate it."

Chandler's writing, though, is unquestionably stylish and witty. It's well-known so no-one would require a ton of examples to be persuaded - and yet it's plain and simple enough that it isn't going to put off anyone who'd find a contemporary "literary thriller" - the sort with a strong emphasis on the literary - to be pretentious. Where there is obvious exposition, and there isn't much, it feels like a natural part of the story. Seventy years after The Big Sleep was published, it is still a platonic ideal of how to phrase thriller writing - though Chandler is also distinctive enough that it would be foolish to imitate him too closely.

I'd always had a problem with classic noir sounding generic or absurd; I would hear it in my head in Steve Martin's narrative voiceover from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a film that was on TV regularly in my teens and which I must have seen maybe four or five times - I learnt about many noir tropes from a spoof before I ever saw or read the real thing. I eventually learned to appreciate the classic films in themselves, but when I tried to read noir as text, back came the echoes of Steve Martin, and I couldn't take it seriously, nor could I understand how so many other people took it seriously. (This is probably why I hadn't read Chandler before, but recently enough book lists and reading challenges converged.) But reading The Big Sleep just now, it didn't take long for the Steve Martin voice to change to Humphrey Bogart's, an excellent sign, and at some point in the second half of the book, I wasn't hearing every sentence in any actor's voice, and the novel and book-Marlowe became their own thing.

I think Chandler's elaborate metaphors possibly read even better now than they would have at time of publication - full of details of place and time, they augment the setting and sense of history, and have become exotically vintage. As a rule, I'm not that interested in the WASP USA and novels about it, but found Marlowe's LA compelling, partly through the book, partly through of the frisson of classic noir films. To appreciate even more of the references and slang, I would love to have read an annotated edition - there is one, but it's not too readily available, and the Penguin Modern Classics edition I read, The Big Sleep and Other Novels, has no notes.

Unfortunately there are old homophobic-sterotype characters (types I don't think I've seen in books later than the 1960s; I was really old before I realised this sort weren't simply villains who happened to be gay), and other characters being homophobic about them. And the plot structure is almost like two novellas and a short story (or a play in three acts?) but otherwise it's still nigh-on perfect, in both writing and story being neither too simple nor too complicated. (I'm not going to criticise the femmes fatales because it's rare in most modern non-mythological literature - I've read next to no classic noir - for there to be scenes where an attractive young woman's sexual advances are unwelcome to an unattached straight man, and even cause him stress; I rather wish I'd read this at 18 or a little earlier, as a small counterweight to the overwhelming 90s pop-culture and post-war litfic messaging that men were always up for it.)

A great deal has already been said about The Big Sleep, so I will now just link to what is IMO the best GR review of it I've read (by a US literature academic). Whilst I like Chandler's phrasing better than this reviewer, he makes points I'd want to about the novel (and film's, and noir's) place in the Anglophone urban psyche and pop culture, and how Marlowe maintains both integrity and his place in a gritty milieu; the review's highlighting of The Big Sleep as a knightly quest, and of the glimpses of queerness in the narrative, enabled me to get more out of the book.

(read & reviewed January 2020) ...more

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