A Darkness More Than Night (Harry Bosch, #7; Harry Bosch Universe, #10)

by Michael Connelly

“It doesn’t seem like a lot

to you because you’re in the

life. I’m not. I’m out of it, Jaye. Even going back into it for a day is going to change things. I moved out here to start over and to forget all the stuff I was good at. To get good at being something...

He tried to push away these thoughts and the questions they raised but could not completely blind himself to the essential conclusion that there was something wrong with him, something missing. It was something that prevented him from fully embracing that which most men seemed to long for.

“No one is an expert on Bosch,” Vosskuhler said without a smile. “Tortured soul, tormented genius… how will we ever know what is truly in a man’s heart?”

“Bosch knew all of the demons,” he said without turning from the painting. “The darkness…” A long moment went by. “A darkness more than night.”

“I don’t think so. But it’s Bosch, right?” “His signature piece. The

triptych called The Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s in the Prado in Madrid.

“Hieronymus Bosch is certainly considered an enigma and he probably always will be.”

I think you will find that the majority of the critical analysis to date holds that he was a doomsayer. His work is informed with the portents of doom and hellfire, of warnings of the wages of sin.

To put it more succinctly, his paintings primarily carried variations

on the same theme: that the folly of humankind leads us all to hell as ...

“But that is the beauty of art and why we study and celebrate it. Each painting is a window to the artist’s soul

and imagination. No matter how dark and disturbing, his vision is what sets him apart and makes his paintings unique. What happens to me with Bosch is that the paintings serve to carry me into the artist’s soul and I sense the torment.”

Owls were everywhere.

Most often in the paintings when the owl was depicted in a tree, the

branch upon which the symbol of evil perched was leafless and gray—dead.

In a circle of gold surrounding the portrait of God and separating him from the other scenes were four Latin words McCaleb immediately recognized.

“Beware, beware, God sees.”

After the fall, man’s freedom of choice leads him to debauchery, gluttony, folly and avarice, the worst sin of all in Bosch’s world being lust. Man wraps his arms around the owl; he embraces evil.”

A darkness more than night.

“I was just going to mention that a lot of the critics and scholars who view Bosch’s work see corollaries to contemporary times.

That’s the mark of a great artist—if his work stands the test of time.

He looked at them and couldn’t help but think of the analogy of the owl as detective. Both creatures of the night, both watchers and hunters—firsthand observers of the evil and pain humans and animals inflict upon each other.

“The feathering turns up into the two points, or ears, on the top of the head. The sales rep said these are called horns and that these types of owls are sometimes called devil owls.”

He

said,

‘I just know what it’s like to be...

the dark.’ Then he sort...

a...

He doesn’t see the hand of God in things. He sees the big wheel. What goes around comes around.

He said guys like Gunn don’t really get away. Something always catches up to them. The wheel.

McCaleb was reminded of all he had and how lucky in life he had been. He was

reminded that luck could be a fleeting thing. It had to be earned and then guarded with everything you had. He knew he was not doing that now. He was leaving things unguarded while he went into the dark.

“The born agains and the born againsts?”

“It means it’s open but nobody’s working it. The LAPD has a special

classification for cases like it, cases they don’t want to touch. It’s what is called

closed by circu...

other than a...

“Storey goes down,” he said. “The monster goes back into the darkness

from

which it ...

A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that

and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance.

You don’t go into the darkness without the darkness going into you.

Lastly, special thanks to Raymond Chandler for inspiring the title of the book. Describing in 1950 the

time and place from which he drew his early crime

stories, Chandler wrote, “The streets were dark with somethin...

Sometimes they st...