Writer: Warren Ellis
Publisher: William Morrow
Price: $21.95
In The West Wing episode “The Two Bartlets”, Toby Zeigler confesses to the President that his staff are never sure which version of him they’re going to get, ‘Dr Jekyll’, the smart, ruthless political operator or ‘Uncle Fluffy’, the self consciously amiable, eccentric grandfather. It’s a great scene, ultimately proving to be one of the turning points of the series, and was the first thing I thought of when I finished Crooked Little Vein, because the novel contains everything that’s good and bad about Warren Ellis’ work.
The novel centres on Mike Mcgill, who is, by his own admission, a ‘shit magnet’. Mike is an ex-Pinkerton Agency wunderkind who struck out on his own and, the moment he did, began to sink into a mire of appalling, even surreal bad luck. Mike’s life is an endless merry go round of insanity, from the seemingly immortal rat in his office who hates him with a fiery passion to his last case, which involved an unholy combination of date rape drugs, businessmen and ostriches. A physical and emotional wreck, Mike is trapped in a world which, it seems, really doesn’t like him. At all.
His luck doesn’t change when the White House Chief of Staff hires him to find the other US Constitution. Bound in the skin of an extra-terrestrial, the book is a sociological Weapon of Mass Destruction which the government plans to use to heal America, resetting the nations’ values to a kinder, gentler, more easily controlled time. The book has spent years making its way through the darkest side of American culture and as a result, Mike’s the perfect man for the job. Aided by Trix, a polyamorous sex researcher who finds Mike’s life as fascinating as he does horrifying, he makes his way into America’s crooked little veins, searching for the most important book in the nation’s history.
At his best, Ellis is a fiercely intelligent, often very funny writer whose cynicism is matched only by his compassion, and the Mike/Trix relationship is amongst some of his best work. Mike in particular is a wonderful main character, an innocent abroad in a world which embodies the ‘You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you’ speech from Fight Club. In the hands of a lesser writer, Mike would never develop past this, but Ellis tempers that innocence with the same fierce sense of right and wrong that Richard Fell, Spider Jerusalem and to a lesser extent, Michael Jones, all embody. Running the gamut from comic relief to incandescent with rage, Mike is amongst Ellis’ most interesting central characters and his interactions with Trix in particular are sweet, funny and a remarkably grounded, pragmatic look at the problems of starting off a relationship.
At his best, Ellis has a paired back, almost Chandler-esque style that lets the characters and their actions stand proud above the text and there are several scenes here that do just that. Mike’s conversation with a serial killer, alone in business class high above Nevada is amongst the finest work he’s ever produced, balancing on a razor’s edge between comedy and desperate, claustrophobic horror. Similarly, his first meeting with Trix, at a distinctly ‘adult’ Godzilla screening, is arguably the funniest moment of the book, Mike’s growing realisation of what he’s seeing mirroring the reader’s own, until it reaches some sort of Hunter S.Thompson-esque horror/comedy critical mass.
At it’s best Crooked Little Vein can stand shoulder to shoulder with Thompson and Chandler, mixing the two to create a novel which both reflects and embraces the moral shift in America that the White House is so concerned about. There are flashes of brilliance here, moments like the serial killer conversation and Mike and Trix’s encounter with a very real, very dangerous drug dealer, that mark Ellis out as an author with an incredible future in prose. Unfortunately, those moments are frequently separated by sections written by the other Warren Ellis. For every moment of genuine horror, every well observed character beat or pitch-perfect joke, there’s another that falls absolutely flat.
At his worst, Warren Ellis is an author whose fondness for research can get in the way of his characters, and there are numerous examples of that here. From the bodybuilding gay cop who enjoys infusing saline solution into his (And other people’s genitals) to the demented Roanoke family, the supporting characters are wildly uneven in tone, at times existing to do little more than show the extremes of human behaviour that the Government want to stamp out. However, instead of being well rounded individuals, many of these characters are little more than a mouthpiece for their particular fetish, cheapening the debate over what is ‘normal’ that the novel attempts to address. Even Trix falls victim to this, at times using her polyamory, a practice which is by definition inclusive to push Mike away, becoming both a significantly less sympathetic character and something of a hypocrite as a result.
At its most detrimental Ellis’ fondness for standard character tropes damages his work, and Crooked Little Vein is no exception. Here, we get not one but two separate versions of the ‘Old, rich, insane, perverted, hates women’ figure, both of whom barely function as characters. The White House Chief of Staff, in his first appearance, delivers a piece of dialogue so cringingly terrible that it almost renders the rest of the chapter unreadable, and spends much of the rest of the novel doing little more than acting as a colossally over-the-top embodiment of everything he claims to be against. However, even he seems considered and balanced when compared to Mr Roanoke, the Texan oil baron whose son briefly held the book. Ancient, raddled, savagely dangerous and fearful of woman; he’s a pantomime figure in a story that demands a credible, even ‘normal’ adversary and, like so many other characters, cheapens his side of the novel’s central debate to an almost irrevocable degree. Along with Falconer, the sexual detective who Mike briefly encounters, there’s a real sense of the author playing for the audience with these characters, getting easy laughs and sacrificing much of the novel’s impact to do so.
The two Bartlets, Dr Jekyll and Uncle Fluffy. The Two Ellis’, the fiercely intelligent ideas man and the grandstanding figure, always chasing the easy joke or the stereotypical character. Both of them are on display in Crooked Little Vein, constantly struggling for dominance, and neither quite succeeding. As a result it’s an astonishingly frustrating read, sections of Ellis’ best work to date sitting next to some of his worst. Ellis is a hugely accomplished writer and has a great future in prose but sooner or later, he’ll have to decide which Warren Ellis he wants to be. Personally, I hope it’s Dr Jekyll.
Alasdair started writing when he was nine, powered by a hefty diet of '80s cartoons, Doctor Who and Icepops. He's quite tired by this stage but has written a lot of things for a lot of people, including Fortean Times, Neo and Surreal.