Ben's Updates

"As the book opens, we're spectators in a kind of church-slash-operating theater, observers at a ceremony in which Leo Tani, a flabby fence nicknamed the 'Shank, is hoisted up on hooked chains and lovingly, ritualistically flayed in gruesome detail. We could be excused for checking the book cover one more time to make sure we didn't grab some Clive Barker Cenobite saga by mistake. We thought this was supposed to be a crime novel. But Jack O'Connell doesn't travel down the mean streets we might be familiar with, and it shouldn't take us long to figure out "Word Made Flesh" is not your average crime novel.

We're in Quinsigamond, a Yankee, post-industrial hellhole of abandoned factories, stygian alleyways, "meatboy" gunsels and twisted police. An ex-cop named Gilrein pilots a Checker indie cab through the night (to the strains of Bernard Hermann, no doubt). Where once "Gilrein rode Tani's chubby ass as if he were God's own cop ... Now he plays chauffeur to the 'Shank, hauling him from exchange to exchange and always pocketing the overgenerous tip." When Leo disappears, aspiring neighborhood "mayor" (crime boss) and mad rare-book aficionado August Kroger sends his thugs, Raban and Blumfeld, to question Gilrein. The meatboys drag him into an alley for the interrogation, beating him and demanding "the package" until Oster, one of Gilrein's cop colleagues, comes to the rescue with an Ithaca pump. Gilrein resists the pushy entreaties from his former brethren to rejoin the force and its elite unit of alpha-male badasses, the Magicians. ("It's like being a priest. You can't just walk away. It marks your soul forever.")

The mystery of Leo's death drives Gilrein to the casebooks of his deceased wife, Ceil. (No one in this book has a real name, like Chester or Susie.) Ceil was also on the force, a member -- the only member, in fact -- of the E (for Eschatology) Squad run by Emil Lacazze, a man known as the Inspector, "the department's Rasputin." A former Jesuit, the Inspector applies the methods of critical thinking to solve crimes and mindrape suspects into confessing.

"There was a time when there appeared to be no case that Inspector Lacazze could not unravel using his Methodology. During his first season of total autonomy he began to accumulate successes like a mad and compulsive collector. Word started to spread ... horrible, whispered fables about the voodoo cop, the mojo bull, the dark priest with his candle and his mirror, his sweet wine and terrifying eyes, and, worst of all, his voice, this noise that came out of his throat in a bark and jumped inside of you, broke into your head, found a way inside your brain no matter what you did and repeated word after word after word until you were ready to chew your own arms out of the cuffs and run into the night, screaming like the devil had his hands around your heart."

Ceil was slain in an explosive confrontation with the Tung, a cabal of anarcho-terrorists dedicated to the destruction of the printed word. The disaster cost Ceil her life and the Inspector his job. Fallen from the Jesuits, fallen from the police department, he freelances around the edges of the law. As we read deeper into Ceil's notes, we learn that she was primarily investigating Lacazze himself and his efforts to break down and unlock language and force it to his own purposes.

Along with his extralegal work, the Inspector plays backseat confessor to Otto Langer, one of Gilrein's fellow gypsy hacks. The answers Gilrein seeks very likely reside in Otto's memories(?) of the Erasure, the obliteration of a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European city named Maisel.

"Word Made Flesh" is going to tax our suspension of disbelief. The dialog is luridly purple, the characters are exaggerated to the point of grotesquerie, and the story's not very plausible. That's going to be a problem for some readers. Satirical touches -- such as August Kroger's sweatshop full of underage illegal immigrants locked in veal cages to produce comic books for Kroger's publishing racket -- are likely to irritate noir purists. And the book is more than a little pretentious. O'Connell shouldn't leave his Pynchon hanging out like that. But we make allowances for ambition round here and give points for originality. Like Frank Miller's "Sin City," this is crime fiction touched with the otherworldly. "Word Made Flesh" is an exercise in style, noir pushed to its horrific ultimate. O'Connell is less concerned with reality than with twisting genre tropes to the breaking point.

If James Ellroy approves (and, intentionally or not, O'Connell's physical descriptions of August Kroger make the villain sound quite a bit like Ellroy himself), who are we to say otherwise? "