the power of the dog (don winslow)

Back before this blog existed, so many years ago, I read James Elroy’s novels American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. It could be argued that his novels did more to document and reveal the realities of US post-war history than any other source of information. Elroy achieved this by taking actual and frequently unreported events and inserting them into a fictional framework. He was writing crime thrillers which were also history texts. He also wrote with a succinct effective style, which kept a complex narrative moving whilst retaining a literary ambition.

Elroy’s historical novels have dried up. History has not. Winslow has taken up the baton with this novel, the first in a trilogy. The areas the novel treads, connecting US foreign policy with the War on Drugs and the submerged wars of Central and Southern America, is terrain that demands the Elroy treatment. Winslow makes the necessary connections, putting the pieces of the jigsaw together, from Putamayo to Hell’s Kitchen. History tends to belong to the victors, and the only ones who can mitigate against this are the writers.

Unfortunately, in this early novel, much of the subliminal messaging of the characterisation works against the writer’s central thesis. His central thesis is that the USA is a rogue state which will do anything, get into bed with anyone, in order to sustain its primacy. However, within the novel, the only characters endowed with any kind of heroism are those who come from the USA. Those who come from south of the border are all, with the exception of a priest who will be sacrificed for his goodness, deranged psychopaths. The North Americans are valiant pursuers of justice, who even in their most ambivalent moral moments (because even good men have to go to bad places) exude a craggy nobility. The South Americans are dashing criminals. There’s a touch of the Cormac McCarthy’s about all this and as the novel unfolds it starts to grate, precisely because it seems to go against the writer’s stated historical agenda.

Nevertheless, I am sure I shall read at least one more novel from this trilogy. Because, even if the execution is shoddy, the value of literature as a medium of recalibrating the effects of power is one that cannot be underestimated.