Down in the Depths

Posted 2 January, 2008 in Book Reviews |

Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis. William Morrow, $27.95 cloth, 280 pp., ISBN: 978-0-06-072393-4.

“I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug.”

That is the opening line of Crooked Little Vein, the debut novel by acclaimed graphic novelist Warren Ellis. If that line in any way offends, repulses, or otherwise unnerves you, you’d be well advised to give this novel a very wide berth, because in the pantheon of outrageous perversity that unfolds over the following 280 pages, that’s about as effete and as tasteful as things get. If, however, you have a taste for the macabre, if you laughed out loud at the little dogs getting murdered in A Fish Called Wanda, and if you set aside American Psycho because it wasn’t edgy enough, this short novel — which reads like what would have resulted if Hieronymous Bosch had written The Da Vinci Code — might be for you.

The story — such as it is — involves one Michael McGill, a luckless private investigator whose last case involved a group of men engaged in amorous relations with a flock of ostriches, “a human shit-tick, swimming through the toilet bowl of America,” “renowned for plucking diamonds from that skyscraper of blood-flecked turds that is the American cultural underworld.” McGill is hired by the chief of staff to the President of the United States to track down a book, an alternate Constitution complete with twenty-three “Invisible Amendments,” which “is reputedly bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels,” and “is weighted with meteor fragments. The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.”

Still with me?

Not that this admittedly outlandish premise matters that much, really. Crooked Little Vein is nominally a hard-boiled detective story modelled on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but the mystery story is just an excuse for Ellis to provide us with an increasingly deranged series of set-pieces featuring the denizens of the “American cultural underworld” that McGill encounters on his trek to find the missing volume. What evolves is a kind of picaresque on acid involving saline-infused testicles, philosophical serial killers, and a cocaine-addled millionaire who takes advice from a talking teddy bear. Ellis is clearly operating in the Jerry Stahl mode of literary provocation, and his takes evident glee in dreaming up his outrageous and polymorphously perverse scenarios.

What is surprising is not the book’s compulsivity: this is a novel that dares you to look away, to stop reading, and it comes out of the gate at full speed. If you make it past the first chapter, you’re likely not going to stop, and the spiralling depravity of the events in the novel ensures that a willing reader is propelled forward on an ever-increasing current of narrative energy.

No, what is surprising is that there is a moral centre to the story, and that the author actually manages to score a number of rhetorical points while constantly upping the gross-out ante. Ellis is interested in what defines the cultural mainstream of our society as against what exists at the margins. In a world where serial killers are more popular than rock stars in the mass psyche and large-scale Internet sex sites catering to every kind of fetish or paraphilia are patronized by soccer moms and librarians, is it even possible to speak of margins any more? If so, where are they, and to what extremes does a person have to go (or to sink) to find them?

These are pressing questions, and Ellis deals with them head on. He throws an unforgiving, incandescent light on a society that has passed — almost without our realizing it — through the looking glass. Even in a cultural landscape that resembles a funhouse mirror, there are moral lines to be drawn, and Ellis is adept at locating them, while always remaining non-judgemental of those outsiders who enjoy more alternative or esoteric — yet essentially harmless — pursuits.

There is fun to be had here, for sure, but beyond and beneath the fun there is also a serious artist asking some probing questions about the way our culture is constructed in the early years of the 21st century. Crooked Little Vein could never be mistaken for great literature, but as a quick, dirty, entertaining diversion it is to be recommended. That it also asks some provocative questions is just the icing on Ellis’s perverse little cake.

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