Perfidia
James Ellroy
[William Heinemann]
James Ellroy, the self-styled ‘slick trick with a donkey dick’, is back with novel number 20, and it’s a doozy. Perfidia is a WWII-set prequel to Ellroy’s LA Quartet, whose novels LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia both received the movie treatment, which is funny because Ellroy writes the kind of 100-proof noir – full of torture, snuff and incest – that Hollywood would be hesitant to adapt. Understandably excised from the big screen was Ellroy’s fondness for racial epithets. Here, they’re often deployed fraternally (‘My yellow brother’) but their constant use shows the weight of race in WWII. This goes so far as to inflect the book’s structure: Perfidia’s first two sections are headed ‘Japs’ and ‘Chinks’. Ellroy knows he’s playing with fire but never succumbs to racism, providing a sympathetic voice to racial victimhood in Dr. Hideo Ashida, a brilliant LAPD chemist who must compromise his values to secure quarter for his family in the anti-Japanese pogroms instituted by the war.
The novel’s story covers 23 days in December 1941, beginning with the discovery of the remains of a Japanese family on the eve of Pearl Harbour. The plot centres around ensuing moral, social and racial tensions in the police department and its crime-ridden surroundings. Joining Ashida are three Ellroy archetypes: ambitious dipsomaniac Captain William H. Parker, morally unimpaired Lt. Dudley Smith, and smart floozy Kay Lake. A lot has been said about Ellroy’s telegrammatic style, born from police procedurals and gossip rags. There’s something joyful in the way he includes surreal and scurrilous asides on the Hollywood élite – Clark Gable snacks with Dali’s puma and Bette Davis figures as a love interest while next door Rachmaninoff mows his lawn. One criticism, from a purely Irish point of view, is Dudley Smith’s inaccurate japes on Dublin during the War of Independence. He places Pádraig Pearse on Grafton Street in 1921, and communes with a wolf on the ‘Irish moors’. Maybe it’s opium distorting his timeline, but at least he gets ‘Sackville Street’ correct.
Words: Eoin Tierney
