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 The tension between presence and absence (the dead sister’s but also humanity’s, the death of the individual and civilizations big thematic aspects of this novel) becomes palpable here in the tension between sound and silence, belief and non-belief, joy and longing, grief and ecstasy.
Reviewed by Dan Larson
The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time
by Michael McIrvin
Bewrite Books
December 2009, paperback, 237 pages, $13.36 USD, ISBN: 978-1-906609-34-4
So, I am reading along in this excellent, albeit quite different, noir thriller about a former CIA agent who is being forcibly recruited by other former agents into a freelance enterprise because of certain experiences he had in Mexico and Central America in his agency days. I am reading along entranced by the story and wishing I had written some of the incredible language McIrvin uses, when I come upon the main character’s description of the interior of a church, which stops me cold, literally shivering.
The main character is telling one twin sister about following the other sister, recently murdered by the men drafting the main character to do bad things, to church. The sister he is telling this tale does not believe him: “Justine didn’t go to no church, Sonny… You know how she was with that soci-Oh-logical stuff, always explaining the world, and without help from no Jesus… I appreciate you want to comfort me Sonny, but you can’t make this up, not this.”
Sonny insists that Justine came out with the choir. He says, she “let loose a gut-wrenching tremolo like I had heard on my one mission to the Middle East, a cosmically orgasmic yodel that echoed in the rafters…” He describes that tremolo as an act of mourning mixed with ecstasy and Justine’s version as “this sound-to-get-God’s-attention.” And then he tells her sister that Justine stopped her strange warbling, and
…the quiet after that storm of sound was pristine, as clean as the first day of creation maybe, not a cough, not a sniffle, not a sigh, as if there wasn’t a human being in the place, not a human being on earth, as if Justine’s wail had exploded us all like fine glass. Then Justine sang Amazing Grace, a song I remembered from my childhood. A song I never heard before Justine sang it in that clarity of being she had given everyone in the church at that minute, and the choir hummed along and swayed in the background, and I could see several people in the congregation weeping for what they are, an enormous joy shot through with a terrible longing.
The tension between presence and absence (the dead sister’s but also humanity’s, the death of the individual and civilizations big thematic aspects of this novel) becomes palpable here in the tension between sound and silence, belief and non-belief, joy and longing, grief and ecstasy. The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time makes much of such moments of juxtaposition: the filthy unnamed rustbelt town where the action starts made deceptively clean by a snowstorm and representative of a world without humans to defile it, the affluence of the supposed boss of the freelance operation living in a mansion above the brown cloud of Mexico City and the terrible poverty underneath it, an innocent Mayan child who is wise beyond his years but also an assassin in training, and many more.
The effect of such a strategy is powerful all by itself, a move to make the reader feel off balance even as he is pummeled by images of mayhem. But when you add the muscular poetry used to describe this dark world, which is our own world, the discomfort rises exponentially: a dying man “feels the enormous dragon of panic rise to look him in the eye and then subside”; the leader of the freelance agents “laments like the Professor Emeritus of Death” as he names the courses offered at the School of the Americas when he was there, a course list that is both macabre and funny and results in a kind of found poem of the bleakest dimensions imaginable; and the heat in Mexico is described as having teeth
…of vernacular steel. The heat is unremitting and remorseless and a thousand other multi-syllabic descriptors… Mexicans know the heat is a God, unambivalent and voluptuous as the universe compacted to fit the street you walk, the road you drive like a zombie because your blood is congealed syrup and your brain weighs several slow tons, and they do not speak of the heat for fear it will grow angry and set the world alight one last time, cook us all like chickens in a pot.
The tone is unambiguously noir, of course, and the storyline is top-shelf thriller, filled with intrigue and various plots and misdirection (although there are characters here you will not find in any book of the type that I am aware of). But it is these moments of harsh poetry that make the book a truly memorable read. I was stopped cold several times, left humming, maybe roaring, like the jet engine to which McIrvin compares the sound the choir made as Justine stepped forward to “get God’s attention.” I had to reread such passages, sometimes over and over. Not because I missed something but because the words resonate in the brain:
The bats are quick shadows against the stars that explode above us, a second’s respite only in a world of murder and torture, flaming corpses and men and women and children gone forcibly blue in the face, of ancient trees stolen and other debauchery only a demon could invent – God laughing at his own joke.
Such excellent writing is rare in any work of fiction these days, let alone one advertised as a thriller, noir or otherwise. I highly recommend The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time, and not just to those who seek out high-tension fiction but to anyone who appreciates the extraordinary use of words no matter the context.
Dan Larson is writing his own novel about the CIA and a nonfiction book about karate.
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