James Ellroy - Perfida

James Ellroy is perhaps best known for his two works Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. I recently read, and enjoyed, his American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, set among conspirators, CIA agents, murders and racists around the time of the Kennedy assassination. When I reviewed American Tabloid I described it as being set in "the dark underbelly of the American dream".

Perfida is a very different book to the sprawling conspiracies of American Tabloid and its sequels. However it is also a very dark encounter with US history. Set in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbour, the book looks at a horrible episode in US history - the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans for alleged threats to national security. This infamous event was the culmination of racism, imperialism and an opportunity for people to steal the assets and land off those arrested and interned. 

Ellroy explores this episode through the investigation by Los Angeles Police of the murder of a Japanese family. Two rival detectives, both of whom feature in other Ellroy novels set later, are here as is Hideo Ashida, an intriguing character - a Japanese forensic specialist cop. As they police investigate they unravel a conspiracy that brings together Fifth Columnists, asset strippers and many other lowly types, that threatens to spill over the bring down corrupt politicians, policeman and other nasty types.

Its a fat book. Ellroy's clipped style is taken to many an extreme here. "He snagged his car and laid tracks. He took the 1st Street bridge to Broadway. He took Broadway to the parkway. He popped two bennies and hit Avenue 45". It is not hard to believe that 790 pages could have been 350. Sadly Ellroy's probably too big an author to have that level of editing these days. 

But lack of brevity is not the problem. Nor, indeed, is the violence. For me the convoluted plot took too long to bring to a conclusion and I had mostly lost interest by the time it was wrapped up. But if that was one issue the other was the characters who are too one-dimensional. There's  Kay Lake a young woman with radical ideas desperate for adventure whose endless stream of lovers just happens to include almost every other major character. Her radicalism is quickly brought off by a policeman lover who happens to want her to destroy a group of leftists. The leftists in this book, including the awfully cliched radical filmmaker Claire De Haven (who has apparently read Marx and various religious tracts and concluded Marx got it wrong on religion and there is a god) are bad parodies but, I suspect, they reflect what Ellroy thinks about leftists of all stripes.

If the left in Perfida are corrupt, the right are appalling. But it is the right, the fascists and the racists, who get all the airtime to spot off their views and engage in their nefarious plots. There's plenty of random deaths, beatings and racist attacks here. But no one (even the leftists) seems to care. As I thought when I read LA Confidential, one of the problems is that there are no good, or kind, or even normal people in Ellroy's world. This is the underbelly of the US, but there's no nice side. No solidarity, friendship or kindness. 

After finishing Perfida I realised that I had the option to read the rest of the trilogy. But I also realised I didn't care enough - about the characters, about what James Ellroy was trying to say, or about his distorted view of the world.

Related Reviews

Ellroy - L.A.Confidential
Ellroy - American Tabloid
Ellroy - The Cold Six Thousand