Rating: 3/5
Review:
Rather dull
I’m afraid I found
Only To Sleep pretty dull and rather aptly titled for me. As a lover
of Chandler’s originals I approached it with some scepticism,
especially after John Banville’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, which I
thought was a pretty dreadful pastiche of Chandler’s style. This
was stylistically better, but really didn’t add up to much.
It’s a good idea
in many ways to set the book in 1988, when Marlowe is 74 years old;
his narrative voice is calmer, less snappy and the wisecracks and
brilliant similes almost absent. It’s reasonably plausible from an
older Marlowe and avoids having to try to imitate the inimitable
originals. The trouble is, it’s not very interesting. The plot,
such as it is, revolves around a dodgy death in Mexico, to where
Marlowe has now retired. He is persuaded to look into the matter by
an insurance company who aren’t happy about the claim and
then...not very much happens. I remember an old Private Eye parody
of one of the le Carré TV adaptations along the lines of:
Lengthy shot of
Smiley walking slowly up a lane to the door of a house.
Smiley knocks.
Long pause.
Window opens
upstairs and a woman’s face appears.
Smiley: “My name
is Smiley. George Smiley.”
Pause.
Woman: “Go away!”
Window slams. Long
close-up of Smileys thoughtful face. Eventually he turns away.
Lengthy shot of
Smiley’s back as he walks slowly away from the house.
Repeat for four
following scenes.
Well, I got rather
that feeling with Only To Sleep. Marlowe talks to a lot of people
whom we don’t know in unfamiliar places so it’s all rather hard
to keep track of. A very slow picture of the dead man emerges.
Slowly. And so on. Without Chandler’s matchless prose, human
insight and wit to underpin it, the whole thing became dull to me and
I began to skip, without feeling I was missing much.
This isn’t the
mess that The Black-Eyed Blonde was, but it’s not a significant
addition to the Marlowe canon either. I can’t really recommend it.
(My thanks to
Vintage Digital for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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