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| Trav salvages another chickadee. |
It’s always nice to start the year with a literary palette cleanser, a mental sorbet if you will, and there is none better than John D. MacDonald for a bit of light but thrilling entertainment. However, this was one that perhaps had languished in the back of the freezer for too long and had become crystalline and frost-bitten, resulting in a somewhat lumpy texture and a mostly underwhelming experience.
As regular readers (and hopefully ad-clickers – go on, click the ads, please! It’s the only way I can make any money…) will no doubt have ignored, the Travis McGee novels tend to polarise opinion. Thriller writers and readers love them – the pace is great, the action intense, and the plotting, whilst sometimes, oxymoronically, obtusely complicated, usually makes sense in the end. As James Walling* says:
As the epitome of this [sublime literary] legacy, the McGee series transcends genre fiction, and is rich with piercing psychological insight, social commentary, and clean, compelling prose that lapses into poetry.
They’re short and sharp and mostly enjoyable. Readers with other priorities however occasionally and quite naturally become upset by the affront of rather anachronistic attitudes towards women, or chickadees/pieces of ass/objects of desire or violence (delete as appropriate) as they are often labelled. Indeed, MacDonald’s characters’ descriptions of women rarely stray past the colour of hair and eyes, hips, waist and breasts measurements, and the inferred ability of said eyes and shape in bed.
The Green Ripper is no exception. Good, clean, compelling prose (that does lapse into rather florid poetry at times) is somewhat tarnished by its themes of toxic masculinity. Except that this time, good ol’ Trav is brought crashing back down to the deck of his boat by the sudden death of his girl, the latest one with whom he can imagine a long, lazy life cocking about on the river (as per Lard’s Classic Cuts). He can’t even imagine shacking up with another girl (although he imagines imagining it, quite successfully). Even his hirsute clever-dick accomplice, the Keynesian Meyer, can’t lift him from his funk long enough to party on down with a sultry soon-to-be widow.
In the end, I forget what happens, other than he goes on a surprisingly murderous rampage through the military wing of a religious cult, but it’s all okay at the close of play. And I’m certain there’ll be another chickadee ready to lift his spirits in the next instalment. Which I am definitely going to read.
*Lifted unapologetically from BLOODSHOT RAINBOW: THE SPECTRA OF JOHN D. MACDONALD
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