Ten years or so ago I did a review of a book called What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund, which is all about what the title indicates. Mendelsund makes the case that reading only provides fragments that our imaginations have to fill in. If I recall correctly one example he uses is what Anna Karenina looks like. You might say Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, or Keira Knightley, but that’s allowing for the influence of a more visual medium. When reading any text our response as readers is to create a “readerly vision” more grounded in personal associations and what we find significant. It’s a bit like reading a sentence with all the vowels left out and still having no trouble reconstructing what all the words say because our brains just automatically fill in the blanks. We don’t see what’s missing.
I think this is a profound idea. All reading involves a kind of skimming, and if we can’t say after we’re finished reading the book anything about Anna Karenina’s appearance, that’s because our brains have inserted a filler into that place in the text, or else we skip over it as not being that important.
What made me think of this while re-reading The Galton Case after many years was that there were a number of places in the opening pages where I caught myself doing this same skimming. Detective Lew Archer enters a lawyer’s office where a secretary sits behind a desk that has “a bowl full of floating begonias” on it. Normally I’d just pass over this bit of detail but for some reason I stopped and asked myself if knew what a begonia actually looks like. I realized I did not. So I went online and found out that there are many different kinds of begonias, varying widely in their appearance. This is not a flower I would have any confidence I’d be able to identify.
Later in the same paragraph Archer takes a seat in a “Harvard chair.” Again I paused. Was this a particular kind of chair? Apparently it is, being a style of armchair with a deep seat and railed back and arms. An official Harvard chair would also have the university’s seal. They were used in Harvard’s dining hall back in the day.
A couple of pages later we find Archer proceeding along a “black-and-white terrazzo corridor.” I just assumed a black-and-white pattern of tiling, but then stopped myself as I had with the begonias. What does terrazzo look like? So I looked this up as well and it wasn’t what I had thought at all. Terrazzo is a kind of flooring with chips of marble, quartz, granite or glass floating in a polished cement, polymer, or concrete binding.
Now I’m sure many readers, and indeed many people reading this, will know all of these, or at least two out of the three. But if I’d just been in my normal reading mode I would have only registered that Archer saw a flower on a desk, sat in a chair, and then walked down a corridor with some kind of black-and-white pattern in the flooring. I would have been skimming. And if you’d asked me what I saw when I was reading, the answer would have been far less than the information given.
On to the book. By which I mean not these details, but the story. Which itself displays a bias toward plot and against décor.
Macdonald himself considered The Galton Case to be his first complete Archer novel, figuring it had taken him a dozen years to get to this point. Which sounds about right, but also says something, and by that I mean nothing good, about how today we expect artists’ careers to be front-loaded. If you don’t have a hit with your first or second album, novel, or movie then it’s pretty much not going to happen for you. This is not the way it works, at least in most cases. It takes a while for someone to hit their stride. Faulkner, for example, didn’t give up after Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitos. I don’t think our current acceleration of the process does anyone any favours, but there you have it.
Anyway, Macdonald may have been more comfortable but he also wasn’t breaking much new ground here. Once again we start with Archer making a visit to some stately Californian mansion where the Grande Dame hires him to find a missing person. Money is no object, as “the Galton household had hot and cold running money piped in from an inexhaustible reservoir.” Meaning oil money, I believe. His investigation involves Archer wading through some tortured family history (“Nothing is lost in the universe”), fighting in a mostly friendly way with the law, and getting the crap beaten out of him by some bad guys who aren’t that important to what’s really going on. All of which was par for the course in an Archer novel by this point.
Stylistically there are the usual purple flourishes that rarely feel out of place. OK, the tires of a car that “shuddered and screeched like lost souls under punishment” is too much, but that’s an example of one that stood out. Better is the desk clerk at a seedy hotel who “had large sorrowful eyes and a very flexible manner, as if he had been run through all the wringers of circumstance.” I miss those desk clerks. But then, I’m not often in those sorts of hotels anymore.
I’m not sure I buy all the coincidences in the plot that leave young John Galton right where he’s supposed to be in the end. More than that though, I didn’t care for the moral lens that Archer brings to the case. In the first place we get the harsh treatment of Gordon Sable. “You surprise me, Lew,” Sable tells him at the end. “I didn’t expect you to bear down so hard. You have a reputation for tempering the wind to the shorn lamb.” Now to be sure Sable is no angel. He’s one of those compromised older men with a young wife/lover, like Graves in The Moving Target. But in his defence, the guy has been through a lot, and the people he was dealing with were worse.
I just wrote “defence,” which is the Canadian spelling. This makes for the big giveaway clue here, as Galton Junior is revealed to be Canadian by his spelling of “labour.” I got a smile out of that. Macdonald himself was born in the U.S. but raised in Canada and his wife was Canadian. This is one reason people have seen a connection between Macdonald and Galton, and in fact he did admit to some autobiographical elements being present. Which leads me to the second part of the moral judging I mentioned. If Archer bears down hard on Sable he seems to let Galton off the hook a little too easily for my liking. Whatever the facts of the case at the end, Galton is a nasty little schemer, a violent drunk and guilty of at least manslaughter (and probably worse). But he ends up winning the lottery, getting both the money and the girl. Will he “take good care of her,” as Archer wishes? I don’t see any reason to be hopeful. This is a young man on the make. If there’s any justice it’s in the hints dropped earlier about how “money was never free” and the walls of a big estate can be like a prison. I don’t think that bothers John at all though.
Alex Good 