Crime: John Connolly's The Black Angel stands at the wilder shores of mystery writing. It displays great narrative talent and is packed with vivid scenes and sequences. Whether the overall effect is acceptable will depend partly on the pre-existing preferences of the reader: do you like your steak rare, torched, or quivering?
Are you horrified enough by the follies of the world, or do you also require a whiff of the supernatural, the demonic? Many a hardbitten private eye is plagued by inner demons, but Charlie Parker's adversaries include a squad of Satan's followers, who cascade into the book in Miltonic style, to wreak havoc among the sons and daughters of men.
The well-oiled plot (reminiscent of Ross MacDonald at his most mathematical) is so complex that its clockwork sequence of causes, complications and coincidences defy brief summary. From fallen angels preying on fallen women in New York, we move to the missing fragments of a vellum map that may lead to a sinister silver statue lost since the Hussite wars of the late Middle Ages. Like Dracula, the damnable demigods hail from Eastern Europe, but just as in the days of Bram Stoker they swarm inexorably towards the hegemonic centres of Western power.
Although most of the story is told in realistic mode, the demon Brightwell, a wonderfully grotesque creature of whom Hieronymus Bosch might have been both proud and nervous, soon establishes a reach, and a grasp, beyond the purely natural. Brightwell's predilection is murder by dismemberment, climaxing in his inhalation of the dying breath (and hence the soul) of his victim. At this point squeamish agnostic vegetarians like myself will already be deciding that this is not our cup of tea, for reasons of both taste and credibility. We may still find ourselves persevering with the book, however, as its superb micro-plotting, Dickensian scene-shifting, and quicksilver changes of tone combine to exert a certain hypnotic power. The book's strong sense of doom is played out engagingly on various levels. One sequence, telling how the wartime theft of a treasure sows discord and death among its receivers, is not a bad modern echo of the Pardoner's Tale from Chaucer.
Certain aspects of the book weaken it morally and artistically. These problems are twofold.
Firstly, the morose delight in Grand Guignol. I counted two dozen individually described deaths, plus a handful of general massacres, in something under 200,000 words. Repetitious killings are OK in epic, but in realistic fiction they can slide towards prurient participation, or even banality.
And The Black Angel does not set out to represent the banality of evil. Here, evil has to be something baroque and magnificent: almost a principle of creation. This is Evil with a capital D.
In epic, death tends to be heroic; in real life, not. Problems arise when one combines epic slaughter with claims of a humane modern sensibility. The Black Angel invites us to abhor murder and torture, except when done by our lads.(Sound familiar?)
A tattooed secretary strips to the waist before gagging and killing an old lady, which seems gratuitous as well as unkind, although there later proves to be a supernatural reason for her strange behaviour. Which leads to my second objection. The links that bind John Connolly's complex plot are predicated on rationality. Rationality belongs to the ethical world of right and wrong, and the value of justice. This sits awkwardly with the rival world of redneck religiosity: the simplistic clash of good and evil, the supreme value of punishment.
Of course a mystery writer has to hack through into some sort of mythic world, or there will be no story worth reading. The Black Angel remains an impressive feat of storytelling, not least for its tonal and linguistic variety. Well-placed detonations of low humour, conveyed in convincing demotic American, provide an effective antidote to the unbelievability of some episodes, and to the occasional excesses of angelic eloquence. A stupid reviewer might take cheap shots at individual turns of phrase, but that would be to ignore how the different styles do their work.
And there are some lovely touches, as when Charlie Parker shakes a lawyer's hand: "It was soft and dry, like an unused sponge."
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin teaches Italian at Trinity College Dublin. His first crime novel, An Irish Solution, written under the pseudonym Cormac Millar, was recently published in Penguin paperback
The Black Angel. By John Connolly. Hodder & Stoughton, 532pp. £10.99