Dreamland by
Newton Thornburg
pbk out November 03
(Serpent's Tail)
at £8.99
Thirty-something Crow is, like Bone in Thornburg's classic Cutter and Bone, a
drifter. He's back in California with Reno in tow, a teenage runaway picked up while
on the road. Crow is here to make some kind of peace with his estranged father, a
retired cop, currently relieving the tedium with the occasional private investigation.
But the reconciliation process has hardly got under way when Crow's father is found
dead in a crashed car, shortly after delivering the results of a brief investigation,
carried out on his behalf by Crow and Reno. Only when two strippers, questioned
during the investigation by Crow and Reno are also found dead, does Crow realise
that something more than mere chance is at work and that he can perhaps make peace
with his father in another way. Dreamland comes at the end of Thornburg's most productive period, the six
books he wrote between 1973 and 1983. As well as Cutter and Bone, they include
both the excellent To Die in California, and the equally haunting Beautiful Kate, still
sadly unpublished over here. Written with the movies in mind (and later optioned
twice), Dreamland has all the thrills, spills, psychotic violence and steamy sex
demanded by 80s Hollywood. But for all its thrills, Thornburg cannot forget the
literary novelist that he set out to be. Crow is always more than just a drifter, his
character carefully established and growing from the start. Chapter endings are as
likely to indicate a step-change in a relationship as to rack up the suspense. The book
has a large cast (unusually for Thornburg) as befits its complex plot. That plot has its
unsatisfactory aspects (notably the conspiracy at its heart) but there is no denying that
Thornburg has lost none of his skills in giving life to each character.
Thematically too the book has moved on. This is "the aching eighties", Reagan's
America, its "festering wound in the wake of Vietnam" (Pelecanos on Cutter and
Bone) now scarred over, its potential for violence "almost like some universal new
source of energy, an electicity one could feel in the air", its decaying idealism
manifest only in posters, "little walls of idealistic propaganda" seeming "not just
pathetic but offensive too." More positively, a process that starts with Beautiful Kate,
there is a greater sense that whilst individual action may never totally achieve the
desired effect, some kind of salvation may be its result. And after that, who knows
what is possible. A necessary book in the Thornburg canon. Recommended.
Dreamland by
Newton Thornburg
