The Reinvention of Classical Noir

by Jonathan L. Woods

Robert Stone has always borrowed elements from the crime fiction and thriller genres with great success. Over the past 35 years he has created a series of dark meditations on the American experience, written with page-turning élan. In his new millennium novel Bay of Souls, he reinvents the classical noir tale of seventy-five years ago to spectacular effect.

‘"By Gad, sir," Michael Ahern said to his son, Paul, "you present a distressing spectacle."’

With this opening sentence Stone gives a playful nod to the noir antecedents of his tale: Sam Spade, Joel Cairo, Miss Brigid O’ Shaughnessy, the fat man and the wondrous black bird. Ahern and his son have just watched the movie of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, an amusing fable in the light of day. But the lighthearted tone of this opening scene quickly turns dark and treacherous.

Michael Ahern, professor at an upper Midwest college, husband and father, is both innocent and consumed by his knowledge of the world – a classic noir protagonist. Ahern is more tarnished and less sure of himself than Spade. But when The Maltese Falcon appeared in 1930, Hitler hadn’t yet begun to stoke up the ovens; and Pol Pot was still in diapers.

Embarking on a winter deer-hunting trip with two professorial pals, he leaves the safety of the small college town where he lives and its surrounding farmlands populated by pink-cheeked, God-fearing farmers, and enters an evil land of swamps and dank woods. They stop at a mean roadhouse catering to "burnt-up drunks" and "two Indian youths with ponytails and druggy, glittery eyes." Ahern shows his weakness for anything female other than his religion-consumed wife, when he flirts with the young and attractive barmaid – a two-bit femme fatale. "Would she like poetry with a joint, after sex?" Ahern wonders. She has a serpent tattooed along her spine.

Ahern considers himself a man of the world, a connoisseur of fine whiskey and dangerous women. Yet he is unable to pull the trigger of his rifle to down a prize buck – leaving that cold-blooded duty to his two collegial companions. Returning home, Ahern is plunged into nightmare, first with a vision of deer carcasses hanging in front of nearly every house in town. Then he learns his son Paul is in the hospital, unconscious from severe exposure to the cold. Paul recovers, but not Ahern. For a moment as he looks at his comatose son, Ahern believes in God or "something out there." But his son’s survival becomes a magician’s trick, a cheap prize pulled "out of a Cracker Jack box." Ahern loses his belief in God, because his God has failed to demand of him the ultimate sacrifice, the life of his son. This opening chapter foreshadows the nightmare journey that awaits Michael Ahern in the remaining pages of Bay of Souls.

After his epiphany, Ahern, like Melville’s Ishmael, is consumed by spleen. But instead of embarking on a three-year whaling voyage to exorcise this demon, Ahern wallows in it – like a pig in shit. Soon he falls under the spell of Lara Purcell, an exotic political science professor at Ahern’s college and a white-Creole refugee from the Caribbean island of St. Trinity.

Lara is the high-class femme fatale of the piece. From a racket ball game in which she lets Ahern win, to a kiss in a sports bar, to cocaine and rough sex, she draws Ahern in until he is smitten. Addicted. Brigid O’Shaughnessy would have blushed at Lara’s directness. After Lara and Ahern fuck for the first time, Lara says to him: ‘"This wife of yours…, didn’t she tell you where her clit is?…because its here. Voila, eh?"’

At this point Lara confesses to Ahern that she has no soul. It is held captive in a vodoun-limbo called Guinee under the sea off the coast of St. Trinity, or even, some say, inside an emerald owned by Fidel, who took her into his bed. Her brother’s soul (he is recently dead from the third-world disease, AIDS) also resides in Guinee. She must return to her home in St. Trinity, she tells Ahern, to release her brother’s soul to heaven and, at the same time, recover her own. Come with me, she says. Ahern has no choice but to pack his bag and make a lame excuse to his wife.

The pace of Stone’s tale ratchets up as the venue shifts from the upper Midwest to the Caribbean and the requisite bad eggs are introduced. They are not as eclectic a crowd of villains as in The Maltese Falcon nor as psycho-scary as Pablo or Lieutenant Campos in Stone’s brilliant A Flag for Sunrise. But they are sufficiently evil and unpredictable to bring to the narrative the stench of fear and death. These miscreants include an army officer veteran of Argentina’s dirty war named Triptelemos (a moniker adopted while tripping on acid given him by Arthur Koestler). Colonel Junot, the current U.S.-backed savior of St. Trinity from a leftist junta. And the paranoid Hilda, ruthless lieutenant of a Columbian militia organization smuggling emeralds and dope through the auspices of Lara’s brother and his close friend Roger to finance their cause.

Stone shows us the politics of greed and power in the new millennium. Ideologies and shifting allegiances twist back on themselves like a Mobius strip. Lara, a radical chic intellectual in her youth, later did dirty work for a shadowy rightwing organization headquartered in an antebellum mansion in northern Virginia. Now she wants nothing to do with politics, only the return of her soul. Wishful thinking, since her deceased brother left behind far too many debts.

Lara and Ahern arrive in St. Trinity by different routes. The island is embroiled in civil unrest. Ahern makes his way from the capital across a dangerous hinterland to the Purcell-family hotel on the Bay of Saints, longing to be in the arms of his demon lover. But Lara is consumed by the vodoun rites by which her brother’s soul will make the passage from Guinee to heaven and she will be reunited with her soul. She draws Ahern deep into the dark middle passage of corrupt politics, paranoia and the hypnotic rhythm of the vodoun drums.

Ahern tries his best but can’t stay the course. For a few brief moments he dances with Ghede, Baron Samedi, the vodoun ringmaster. But he is out of his depth, wildly treading water somewhere between heaven and hell. Roger, the friend of Lara’s brother, speaks to Ahern: ‘"If I were you," Roger said, "I wouldn’t try to play these games."…"If I were you," Roger said, "I should save my life."’ Ahern bolts into the darkness.

Back in the Midwest, but never home again, Ahern’s life disintegrates. His body is racked by savage fevers. He has lost his soul but, unlike Lara Purcell, he has no idea where to look for it. It is as hopeless a quest as the fat man’s for the gold and bejeweled falcon of the Knights Templar. ‘"You took me to hell,"’ he says to a hallucination of Lara. ‘"I’m still there."’ At the end, like Kit Moresby in Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, having been tainted by an alien world, Michael Ahern drifts into madness.

Bay of Souls is a masterly noir journey to the edge.

Copyright© 2005 Jonathan L. Woods

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Read an extract from Jonathan L. Woods's Harry, Harry, Quite Contrary

 

JONATHAN L. WOODS is a lawyer by training and trade, with degrees from McGill University, New England School of Law and New York University School of Law.  Most recently he held the position of Assistant General Counsel for Nortel Networks.  Mr. Woods has traveled widely in Europe, Japan, Mexico and the Caribbean.  Presently, he lives in Dallas, Texas with his spouse, the artist Dahlia Woods, and a bichon frise named Hazel.  He is at work on a new noir tale set in Mexico.
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