A Quick Good-Bye

Somehow I managed to forget the entire plot of Chandler's The Long Good-Bye since first reading it thirty-odd years ago. And I was pleased to have done so since I re-read the novel with a sense of increasing enjoyment purely on the level of story. And what a strange story it is!

At times it's as if Chandler has forgotten the first half of the novel, the Terry Lennox story, as we move into the equally troubled territory of the alcoholic writer Roger Wade. But there're always hints that somehow it will all cohere in the end, and, triumphantly, it does. Yet in certain ways the novel seems to be on the edge of exhaustion. It's a surprise that Marlowe keeps going, but he does.

And so does Chandler - somehow summoning up the energy for great set pieces and a gloriously bleak portrait of Los Angeles, indeed, America itself, when you get the distinct feeling he would rather go off somewhere with a bottle of the hard stuff and escape it all.

With impossible dialogue, an entirely unbelievable hero and whole paragraphs of sententious moralising surfacing when you least expect them, and from the unlikeliest characters, this novel really shouldn't work. But it does.