Цирк мертвецов

by John Kaye, Джон Кей

John Kaye's two novels have established him as one of today's most stunning chroniclers of Los Angeles, a city of rockers and private eyes, script girls and wiseguys, innocents and Charles Manson. Of The Dead Circus, David Ebershoff wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "The reader is compelled to turn the page. . . . Once the novel's momentum takes hold, [its] pursuit becomes ours."



It's 1986. Gene Burk is an ex-cop, fanatical record collector, and private eye. Devastated by the death of his fianc

Genres: Fiction, Crime

Hardcover

First published July 1, 2002

Reviews

[Marcelo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not great - I guess this is what happens when you let atmosphere take over plot. "The Dead Circus" is supposedly about - well what is it really about? There's a storyline about rockabilly singer Bobby Fuller's mysterious death that eventually recedes into the background (only to be given a half a page recount theory of what happened as one character talks to another), then it morphs into a portrait of the Manson clan and its murders from the perspective of someone who was there, and of a disaffected family wrecked by the lack of moral compass that L.A. can foster and by the loss of too many loved ones to fate.

I understand what Kaye was shooting for - a "boulevard of broken souls" portrait of the underside of the Hollywood dream and the wreckage it can leave behind. But it's not very successful - and his tendency to accumulate unnecessary names and detail is the biggest problem here. The first 10 pages alone take an enormous amount of patience to continue, after what amounts to a barrage of name-dropping and casual, somewhat unimportant connections that would give Kevin Bacon a run for his money. Kaye also has a tendency to veer away from the subject, which doesn't help - it seems every time he mentions a movie we need to get a 50-word recap of what the movie was about and who was in it, whether it amounts to something or not. There's anecdote on top of anecdote, and it wears on you eventually.

He is more successful at painting grief and disaffection, as well as the casual monstrosity that permeated the Manson clan and its murderous rampage, and those pages are the best in here. But definitely do not amount to enough to recommend this book.

[Tuck · Rating 2 out of 5]

a noir with too many facts, backstory, motivations. about music, fastlife, manson family, in LA. about a cop looking for the answers to unspeakable things, but unfortunately, talking too much about them.

[Rob Branigin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it would have made a better screenplay than a novel. This book is, basically, a "beach read" for 60s-obsessed collector-scum. There are *way* too many plot threads, way too many characters, and more laughably stilted dialog than I have come across in quite a while ("You don't remember Bobby Fuller? He had a hit with 'I Fough The Law' in March of 1966, a rockabilly classic, but it stalled at #16 on the national charts" - not a direct quote, but close enough - there's a LOT of this kind of dialog...who talks like that?).

Still, though, I think if you go into this with properly-adjusted expectations, it's an enjoyable read for record collectors, true-crime fans, and aficionados of LA history.

[Hoff The Librarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some wonderful lines of prose buried within this mixture of flashbacks, facts about the sixties music scene and pop culture and hollywood happenings, too many facts in fact, which ultimately made it difficult to find the rhythm of the story.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. Sometimes hard to follow as there are a lot of flashbacks and whatnot, but all in all, great book. I definitely recommend it.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not finish this book. I found I did not have any interest in any of the characters, what happened to them or even what the answers to the mysteries were. I found the different story lines in the book to be more muddied together rather than connected. I got about 2/3 of the way through the book and then simply forgot about it, that was how much it held my interest.

[Jay Tate · Rating 2 out of 5]

A confused mess. Too many half plots, with lots of graphic depictions to distract the reader. Barely 1.49999 stars.

[Jennetta Kaarstad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth the read

The storyline was interesting with the mix of fact & fiction. I got caught up, but the ending left me hanging.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gene Burk is a former cop, now a pi investigating the mysterious death of the West Texas pop guitarist Bobby Fuller, some twenty years after his July 1966 death; he's drawn into this ancient case, putatively, to protect his family (wife Alice; brother Ray, nephew Louie; father Nathan) from the implications that case has on another upon which Gene looks more dispassionately, the Family murders of the Tate-LoBianca households of August 1969. The Burk family are old LA hands in the entertainment field, and their struggle is to stay alive parasitically attaching themselves to an entertainment culture brutally focused on the one hand on beauty, and on the other hand on personal connection and in-group favoritism -- just the kind of thing that drove to paranoia the little Cleveland prostitute's son and three-time-loser Charles Manson, who came out to California about the time Bobby Fuller was murdered, and who spent five years stirring the pot before incarceration made his cauldron, from behind bars, somewhat less potent. The Manson and Fuller myths help the Burks identify shifts in industry power -- that's why Bobby Fuller's West Texas guitar fills can signal for some the overturning of the crooner phase in pop.

Burk is the Chandler-type hero (but without Philip Marlowe's wit); the hero's family is John Kaye's vehicle for inventing a myth that can sustain the tinseltown types he has known and loved (Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twin is his script, as is the rock 'n' roll fable American Hot Wax, and Kaye directed Forever Lulu in 2000). As a myth, connecting his Odysseus to Bobby Fuller, Fuller to Frank Sinatra, Sinatra to Hollywood Royalty scions, e.g., Terry Melcher, who sealed out psychotics like Charles Manson, sprinkles dust around what's essentially an insider's historical analysis of how power shifts within the industry, so that historicism (the techné of the know-it-all) and mystery (a literary genre) get all mixed up. The biggest mystification of all is how the counterculturists like Gene Burk and his brother Ray ever came to regard themselves as sexually undeniable, which they surely do. But now we get to this story's meandering weakness -- it can't do without the sexual charisma of its lead characters; the detective's got a hard-on for a clue. But isn't this a genre donné, the one assumption that requires no skepticism? And yet the Californian's way of life is presumably Enlightened. Californians will talk about the Music Industry and the Rackets. The Burks can put names to faces and count the notches on their cocks. Yet, so, too, they are the ones who know the old city, can drop coffeeshop names from the post-War period.

It's in little details like these that as non-LA lifers Kaye's readers never know about that authenticity confers its authority. This 2002 novel is set in the mid-Eighties, so it's telling us something about the Angelinos generation that came after Manson got locked up, and maybe just then because the book took that long to write/publish. There's an LA detail set halfway through, about the hero's brother drunkenly confronting Steve Martin at a restaurant for always being too cool during the period of the late Sixties when Ray Burk was a network censor and Martin wrote censorable material for the Smothers Brothers. Poking around a bit on John Kaye, come to find out he spent time as a CBS censor. The drunken brother acting out gets banned from the restaurant, not allowed to return. That's what I mean by power shifts.

[Amanda Van Parys · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, it was a novel, which is one thing we can get out of the way… If it was a good one, I’m not so sure. It seemed like a circus of name-dropping and convenient circumstances – is that what LA is? All these people are so opportunely connected and available for the story line, it just seemed bizarre. It was well-written, and I didn’t dislike the writing style though the ending was just like a huge drop off like ||DONE. Which is alright, things rarely wrap up prettily in real life, but some kind of closure, even a teeny little drop is sometimes necessary for a book of this nature. The novel felt like more like something that got me interested in the LA of yesteryear rather than in the novel itself.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those reads that is interesting and you can't put it down, yet you hope no one asks you about it because you can't really give a clear answer. It is a compelling story of fact and fiction and murder and music. It started off slow and ultimately there were too many folks to keep track of but once I got the rhythm of the story down it really took off. I think the ending was perfect. Life doesn't always come packaged in a tidy little bow but you just keep on keeping on.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's a germ of a good story here, but it's not realized, at least in the first 142 pages, which was the extent of my interest. The story, convoluted at best, suffers for sake of the 60s and 70s pop-culture references. The first page introduces six characters, and the name-dropping continues with little character development. A different editor (and a different structure, which relies overly on flashbacks and letters) might have made a difference.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. Too many unimportant characters to keep track of. But I dig all the rock references and the intertwining of real Hollywood people with the fictional characters.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Came off as Ellroy-lite, only not quite as overtly brutal. Not bad, but not entirely to my taste.