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darwin8u's review against another edition
4.0
"the most dangerous animal in the world is not the professional killer. It is the amateur."
- John D. MacDonald, Bright Orange for the Shroud
This is the first Travis Mcee novel I've read where I didnt' feel the need to reserve a star because his writing about women & sex was so aweful. Just to be clear, the writing about women still left something to be desired. Every Travis McGee novel makes me imagine Burt Reynolds spanking some bikini wearing eye candy in some movie about cars, boats, or horses. I'm not saying Travis McGee = Burt Reynolds. No. I'm just trying convey the essense of the male/female in these novels. They are certainly not provincial, but they haven't yet made it to modern. But, briefly, in this novel, there was an almost mature, subtle, untangling of sex that was both real and (dare I say it?) beautiful. It is surprising to say that a writer that specializes in Florida pulp can still surprise me. I guess that is why I keep coming back to John D. MacDonald (I think this might now be my 10th JDMac novel). In 1965 he wrote perhaps one of the best, most honest, couple paragraphs about sex I've read (most sex writing sends me running for the hills).
Here is just a taste, a flirt with what I'm talking about:
"I was awake for a little while in the first gray of the false dawn, and heard the lovers. It was a sound so faint it was not actually a sound, more a rhythm sensed. It is a bed rhythm, strangely akin to a heartbeat, though softer. Whum-fa, whum-fa, whum-fa. As eternal, clinical, inevitable as the slow gallop of the heart itself. And as basic to the race, reaching from percale back to the pallet of dried grasses in the cave corner. A sound clean and true, a nastiness only to all those unfortunates who carry through their narrow days their own little hidden pools of nastiness, ready to spill it upon anything so real it frightens them. Heard even in its most shoddy context, as through the papery walls of a convention motel, this life-beat could be diminished not to evil but to a kind of pathos, because then it was an attempt at affirmation between strangers, a way to try to stop all the clocks, a way to try to say: I live.
The billions upon billions of lives which have come and gone, and that small fraction now walking the world, came of this life-pulse, and to deny it dignity would be to diminish the blood and need and purpose of the race, make us all bawdy clowns, thrusting and bumping away in a ludicrous heat, shamed by our own instinct.
Way to go John D.
- John D. MacDonald, Bright Orange for the Shroud
This is the first Travis Mcee novel I've read where I didnt' feel the need to reserve a star because his writing about women & sex was so aweful. Just to be clear, the writing about women still left something to be desired. Every Travis McGee novel makes me imagine Burt Reynolds spanking some bikini wearing eye candy in some movie about cars, boats, or horses. I'm not saying Travis McGee = Burt Reynolds. No. I'm just trying convey the essense of the male/female in these novels. They are certainly not provincial, but they haven't yet made it to modern. But, briefly, in this novel, there was an almost mature, subtle, untangling of sex that was both real and (dare I say it?) beautiful. It is surprising to say that a writer that specializes in Florida pulp can still surprise me. I guess that is why I keep coming back to John D. MacDonald (I think this might now be my 10th JDMac novel). In 1965 he wrote perhaps one of the best, most honest, couple paragraphs about sex I've read (most sex writing sends me running for the hills).
Here is just a taste, a flirt with what I'm talking about:
"I was awake for a little while in the first gray of the false dawn, and heard the lovers. It was a sound so faint it was not actually a sound, more a rhythm sensed. It is a bed rhythm, strangely akin to a heartbeat, though softer. Whum-fa, whum-fa, whum-fa. As eternal, clinical, inevitable as the slow gallop of the heart itself. And as basic to the race, reaching from percale back to the pallet of dried grasses in the cave corner. A sound clean and true, a nastiness only to all those unfortunates who carry through their narrow days their own little hidden pools of nastiness, ready to spill it upon anything so real it frightens them. Heard even in its most shoddy context, as through the papery walls of a convention motel, this life-beat could be diminished not to evil but to a kind of pathos, because then it was an attempt at affirmation between strangers, a way to try to stop all the clocks, a way to try to say: I live.
The billions upon billions of lives which have come and gone, and that small fraction now walking the world, came of this life-pulse, and to deny it dignity would be to diminish the blood and need and purpose of the race, make us all bawdy clowns, thrusting and bumping away in a ludicrous heat, shamed by our own instinct.
Way to go John D.
alanfederman's review against another edition
4.0
This Travis McGee novel was a little darker than some of the others, but compelling from beginning to end. There's a prodigal friend, a long con and the usual assortment of Floridians. Sure some of it feels dated (so does Dickens for that matter), but I couldn't think of a better way to spend a snowy afternoon.
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