Dreamland

Newton Thornburg

Serpents Tail, 2003, £8.99

Reviewed by L. J. Hurst

"If it were all in the script why make the movie?" the director Nicholas Ray once asked (according to Woody Haut's Heartbreak And Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood, also published by Serpent's Tail). There's an exercise for some media studies student in answering that question, and in answering another question, "Why make a movie from the book?" They could look at Newton Thornburg's better known work, Cutter And Bone, which was filmed as Cutter's Way if they wanted some sample material.

It has taken Dreamland twenty years to be published in Britain and it is difficult to read it without seeing it as a film, but film seen in an unusual way. Dreamland does not read as a contemporary work - and in fact, it reads more a work of 1973 than 1983. The relationships of the characters would not seem possible now, and as I projected events onto the screen in my head I saw them in that faded colour in which all the best known crime films of a quarter century ago seem to have been shot.

Crow has never been able to settle down to work; certainly never able to follow his father into wearing The Badge. Now, though, as he has driven down the Pacific coast to make one of his rare parental visits Crow has been forced to act. Picking up hitchhikers Reno and her failed, violent would-be pimp boyfriend, Crow has saved Reno, only to find that she expects to be able to turn her own tricks in Los Angeles.

Reno never gets the chance - Crow is forced to investigate his father's death - ruled a suicide by the police, a murder in Crow's certainty. And Reno comes along, too. And she helps. Meanwhile a chain of hoodlums are being given orders in language which means witnesses who need only be frightened are being killed. Victims, who are already frightened by life, find death comes easily, but with pain.

Crow finally finds a millionairess who will pay his expenses as he follows the deaths down the California coast and into Mexico and back. There are various attitudes in this book that make it a period work: attitudes to the trans- sexual Richard, for instance, which condemn him almost from page one, while Reno, I feel pretty sure, is below the California age of consent when she and Crow become lovers, which today would not go without comment, even if without condemnation. And oddly, the length of the book itself makes it unusual - it's never been filmed that I'm aware of, but it feels like those big novelisations such as The Harder They Come or On The Waterfront which retrospectively realised the size of the material they had to deal with, rather than, say, the shortness of a Dirty Harry novelisation. The work it reminded me of most was Paul Schrader's Hardcore (aka The Hardcore Life), a film which I've never been able to see and have had to make do with reading the novelisation. Finally, for that media student though, the reason I say that Dreamland is not a novel of 1983 but 1973 is that the whole spirit of the work is post-Watergate. It is about bad men in power who set actions going over which they take no responsibility. It could almost be an allegory, but it is a big novel anyway.