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It's good... and
certainly appropriate, as a large part of the action takes place on the
Mauretania, a transatlantic cruise ship often used as a troop transport during
WW II. While a lot more cynical than Fitzgerald, Westbrook writes with an
insider's easy sense of authenticity, especially in the 1st person sections
where the story is told by Jonno, the "torch singer's" son (of course the
historical sections that deal with the Torch Singer's hazardous escape from
Nazi-occupied Poland are really just Jonno stepping back into the 3rd, as he is
the narrator).
The story is pure
Hollywood Babylon, as seedy as sex and crime can be, yet often romantic and
heroic in that ironic and fated way the thespian world gives us its stagey view
of the world. It's both opera and film noir, Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy
rolled with Bizet's Carmen into a heady pop culture spiff. At times you
might think you're reading an expose of The Brady Bunch. Indeed the narrator --
Jonno, the son of the Torch Singer, Sonya Saint-Amant -- was a child star in a
TV sitcom for a brief spell, and before that his mother escaped from Poland,
survived as a grifter in London until she was able to make the Atlantic
crossing to New York. Insofar as the action goes, her story is her son's story,
the desperate past catching up to the munificent present, and by the time Book
1 (An Overnight Sensation) ends, it's the present catching up to the
future.
Great lateral
characters: Julka the Gypsy ("the Great Jabolonski" a.k.a "Count Julka Szopin")
who poses as Sonya's father in their escape from Poland; Max McCormick, the
Hollywood director and wartime Lieutenant who is being furloughed back to the
US when he has a fated meeting with Sonya on the Mauretania; Captain Landson --
later Congressman Landson -- the vet who has a hook for a hand and a slavish
attraction to the indifferent Sonya; Ricky Bolano, a corrupt NY vice cop who
later becomes a blackmailing P.I. in L.A.; Shelly Graves, the iambic English
actor who only comes to Hollywood to sneer and grab the money; Mina Davis
(a.k.a "Aunt Mina") the petite screen star wife of Max McCormick... and many
more exotics and eccentrics as the flashback sections have a picaresque
adventure quality, where coincidence and Fortune smile and frown on or off the
beat as the author deems necessary.
The novel isn't pulp,
although pulp imagery often pushes the action. It starts with a Beverly Hills
murder-suicide and ends... well, you'll have to read it, do the Hollywood Walk
of Fame, maybe even buy Book 2 to find some clearing in the crystal ball. It's
like the "prime suspect is me" gambit. It has that old movie feel in places
i.e. the hanky panky on the Mauretania might remind you of the wartime boat
action in Journey Into Fear but without the bullets. Westbrook writes up a nice
brew of nostalgia mixed with post-modern decadence. Good writing, good
research, lots of laughs and enough grit to make you melancholy, make it
real.
Extorted blow jobs in
a snowy field or a NY cinema will do that. Mind you, this isn't crime fiction
porno or 'true crime' hard bop; the story is a little too Dickensian to allow
any of that.
Sonya reinvents
herself, as many people do, in the New World. She goes from being an apprentice
diva in Krakow to being a "torch singer" in Los Angeles, which would be a
nightclub fatale somewhere between Swing and American chanson. Just how she
manages this is often left to the imagination and what isn't is from the Jerzy
Kosinski survivalist school. You could say Sonya is already living in a movie
before she reaches Hollywood.
Well, we're anchored
off Catalina. Nice sunny day and the jazz festival is happening in the old art
deco Avalon ballroom. Maybe Sonya sang here when the big moon sent its shiver
of madness over the dark, undulating water. So maybe I'll go ashore, walk with
the ghosts... Natalie Wood... the others who came and went.
A few days to come
before we get back to Vancouver. Maybe I'm hooked. Maybe I'll download the
second eBook, Book 2, "An Almost Perfect Ending", see what Robert Westbrook has
in mind.
© LR
October 2016
The Torch
Singer at Amazon: US |
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