A Crooked Little Vein

By Regie Rigby

Regular readers will know that this column has been repeatedly posted late in recent times (and indeed it is again…), mostly as a result of the profound lack of time I’m experiencing in the wake of the start of the new school term and the increased workload that entails.

Regular readers will also be familiar with the size of my current “to read” pile, because I keep whinging about it. So when I mentioned last week, that I’d started reading Warren Ellis’ new novel Crooked Little Vein, I honestly didn’t think that I’d have finished it in time to post a review in this week’s column.

Well, I have. Because after about page twenty I just couldn’t put it down.

Don’t get me wrong. Crooked Little Vein is a first novel – and it shows. It is by no means anywhere near as slick as Ellis’ comics work, and although it is very much steeped in the same attitude as The Authority, Planetary and Fell I felt it lacked the assurance that those works in the medium of comics have.

If that sounds like a bad thing, it really isn’t. It is, I think, a truth universally acknowledged that Warren Ellis is one of the finest – if not the finest – writers in comics today. He can write things in his sleep that would be beyond the average comics scripter on their best day ever. Reading Crooked Little Vein I got the impression that Ellis was outside his comfort zone to some degree, and that meshed so beautifully with the position of the protagonist.

In the first ten pages or so I felt that Mike McGill was going to be nothing more than a Private investigation version of Spider Jerusalem, and I was disappointed. But unlike Spider, who was called back to a locality he’d abandoned and forced to take on familiar things he’d tried to avoid, McGill is forced out into the world on an old school style quest, and confronted with things that he genuinely had never previously contemplated.

Perhaps I’m a prude (or overly British – I know a fair few people who would argue it’s the same thing…) but as McGill trawls his way through the “psycho sexual underbelly of America” I shared his sense of discomfort and incomprehension at the various practices he discovers. It made the whole thing rather more real for me, and I confess that in the face of the mountain of sheer weirdness the book throws at you I could completely understand McGill’s occasional freak outs.

McGill could be described as a “typical” Ellis hero. A loner who finds himself caught up in extraordinary and downright unlikely events, but who never really seems to be involved. McGill is a New York Private Investigator. Not particularly successful, not particularly popular, and very very good at having things go wrong on him. He is, as his only client says, a “shit magnet”. If it’s bad, and it’s happening, then it’s probably happening to him.

This peculiar characteristic (sort of an “anti-superpower” if you think about it) makes him perfect for the job his client is offering. He has to find a book. A book that could ultimately hold the key to the Oval Office because it contains a new version of the U.S. Constitution, drafted by the founding fathers and kept an official secret for generations.

Kept secret, in fact, until Richard Nixon lost it in a whore house. Since then it has been circulating around the more, how shall we put this, sexually adventurous communities. Now certain parties in government want it back.

Thus begins McGill’s quest.

He doesn’t stay alone for long – as a typical Ellis hero McGill needs the standard filthy assistant. She arrives in the shape of Trix, a student who is writing a thesis on sexual fetishes and becomes McGill’s guide across “psycho sexual underbelly of America”. Trix is no mere sidekick though – far from it. She’s an advocate and an interpreter too, constantly challenging the preconceptions, prejudices and pruderies of both McGill, and the reader. You shouldn’t get the idea that Crooked Little Vein is a book about sex and perversion though. It’s true that such things feature in the plot, but as you might expect from a writer of Ellis’ calibre, the narrative is a whole lot more sophisticated than that.

Crooked Little Vein is an investigation of power, and how it can be wielded. It’s a discussion about the nature of freedom, and the nature of individuality. It’s a meditation on what “normal” means. Most of all, it’s an intelligent, thought provoking and unutterably funny read.

Because for all the saline filled testicles, Godzilla Bukkake, porn factories and Jesus headed condoms, there is real thought and philosophy here. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I’m not giving too much away if I tell you that it involves the capacity of camera ‘phones to transmit images worldwide through the internet, and the sheer power that this puts into the hands of just about everyone. (I have such a ‘phone in my pocket right now. I bet that if you don’t, most of you probably have one within easy reach.

Recent events in Burma illustrate far more eloquently than I ever could exactly how much authority has to fear from such devices, and just how right Ellis is.

I loved this book. I suspect you will too. If you’re not sure, the first chapter is available for your perusal at the Amazon website, and if that doesn’t convince you, Ellis also posted chapter sixteen on his Live Journal. Try it and see. If you’re still not sure, you can try to get a copy for free by entering the Warren Ellis Competition. Full details are available on the Fool’s Errand Message Board. You’ve only got ‘till October the Second though, so get a move on!