When I brought back my old paperback of The Big Sleep from KL I was thinking of a quick, turbo-charged read of an old favourite, to be completed in a couple of days. That wasn't to be. The rather silly, but very real, busyness of things recently means that I only finished the novel today despite starting it more than a while ago. But something has been unexpectedly gained from all this.
Needing to read at such a slow speed in the few gaps of real life I've had of late has involved a greater degree of concentration on my part on the wonderful poetry of the novel. And I'm not just talking of the obviously superb images: He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look. (So Chandler-esque, and so easy to parody, but perfect in its place in the actual novel - Marlowe's final encounter with the old, dying General, for whom he, and we, have come to have an unexpected respect.) No, I also have in mind the larger sense of the novel as a whole as a poetic construction.
The description of the sump towards the end, for example, where Rusty Regan sleeps the big sleep. Chandler uncannily evokes both the rottenness just below the surface of the big city, and the darker places of the human mind: There was the stagnant, oil-scummed water of an old sump iridescent in the sunlight. (I love it that he ends the paragraph with sunlight here.)
I'm sorely tempted to move on this evening to The Long Good-Bye, but I'm not sure I can take more of this intensity. I reckon I'll go for a bit of Trollope instead and just settle for a story I can't put down.
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