Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Annotated Big Sleep

Annotating a classic is a great way to make me buy it and read it all over again. * The experience is like a buddy read if your buddy is a wildly enthusiastic Wikipedian** who constantly interrupts you with things you didn’t know you didn’t know. Occasionally this does go too far, and I could feel the rush of blood to the heads of our three lovely annotators when they started defining words like jalopy, highball, chivalry, croupier and rake – rake? Yes, “the long L- or T-shaped stick that the croupier uses to sweep chips across the table”. I might probably have blue-pencilled those.*** But I loved the photos, maps, 1930s adverts, pulp magazine covers and so forth (what exactly did lounging pyjamas look like in 1935? It turns out they looked terrible) and especially the mini-essays about such matters as casual racism

As with much of American literature, the reader is faced with the challenge of reading work that is deeply flawed, but which is also the product of a racist and deeply flawed society. This challenge surfaces with canonical works by such authors as Jack London, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway as well as most early crime fiction

or the ambiguous mortality of Philip Marlowe (is he really a knight errant?****); or what were the big differences between the book and the famous Bogart/Bacall movie*****; the common crime novel trope of the descent into hell; and ending with the most curious question of all.

Because when the last mournful, wry page is turned, the smoke clears and the mirrors are put back in the drawers a discombobulating feeling creeps upon the reader which is - what exactly does Philip Marlowe achieve in The Big Sleep? And the answer is (spoiler alert) not that much. Everything that does happen – a blackmails b, x shoots y, z kidnaps j, j escapes and shoots m, b kisses c – would have happened if Philip Marlowe had never heard of General Sternwood and his two crazy daughters. Marlowe might as well have stayed in bed.

In conclusion, I’m glad to report that a reread of The Big Sleep is a delightful experience, the femmes are as fatale as an autopsy, the similes still startle like a butcher’s kindness and the plot still makes not too much sense to me. The death of the chauffeur is still famously unexplained. (Chandler didn’t know who did it.) But it’s not for the plot, Chandler is why we read Chandler

Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. Her smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.

and however many dead bodies litter these pages Raymond Chandler will always be alive and well and living in L.A. in the late 1930s.

****

*Other annotated versions I have got are I have got are Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Ulysses and HP Lovecraft.



**Someone who contributes to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which anyone can edit, even lamebrains, but their edits don’t last long. For instance, when Jean-Luc Godard died on 13 September I checked his entry to clarify something and came across the statement “He was an anti-semite all his life.” What?? I noticed there was no source referenced & so I thought this is the work of some idiot. When I checked back five minutes later the statement had been deleted.



(Jean-Luc Godard channeling Peter Sellers)

***Blue pencils were used by editors in pre-digital times to indicate text to be removed before printing.

****Errant in this phrase means “wandering”, that is, no longer tied to one feudal lord. He is free to go forth and seek adventure. Philip Marlowe blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.



*****This is a whole complicated story, but how about this – the principal screenwriter was William Faulkner, yeah, that guy. The other thing is that the movie was filmed in 1944 but held back from release because Warners wanted to get some war pictures out first. While that was happening Bogart and Bacall became Hollywood’s Hottest Couple [TM] and so Warners dragged them back and shot some more scenes with them to add into the movie, then released it in 1946. But still they didn’t get any Oscar nominations & neither did the movie. The Oscars suck.