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A review by quirkycynic
Darker Than Amber by John D. MacDonald
2.0
I get that these Travis McGee books are products of their time, and I have managed to not be too bothered by the questionable gender politics for the other installments of the series I've read so far because those were pretty fine escapist adventures.
But I had a lot harder of a time with this one. This time I really did get kind of peeved at the incredulously long passages of narration in which McGee seems to be reciting a personal philosophy about women that reads as if it came straight from a pickup artist blog. John D. MacDonald and Ian Fleming seem to share a lot of commonalities in this regard, in that they are both amazingly outspoken and wrong in their incredibly shallow observations about the female race. McGee, however, is a lot less shameful than James Bond in his opinions about women, who to him usually fall into either the categories of "whores" or "frigids who need a good dicking to become full human beings again".
As I've already said, I still can overlook dated attitudes if the book is entertaining (I'm a lifelong fan of crime fiction for god's sake). But Darker Than Amber really just didn't hook me like the other books did. A lot of it is MacDonald's writing, which had previously been clean and zippy in that old-fashioned pulpy kind of way in his other books, but which here suddenly reads like concrete -- there were so many times that I totally lost the plot of what was going on, who was who, why McGee was doing what he was doing, or what the hell anything meant at all since he seems to have abandoned clarity for the purposes of literary stylistic obfuscation. I just didn't enjoy it. There were a couple of times I was ready to stop reading out of boredom but only forced myself to keep going because the damn thing is only 170 pages.
So if the rest of the books in the series from hereon in are like this, I just don't know if I want to give any more of them a chance, especially if I know that I'll definitely never be in the McGee cult like so many other readers I'd probably never like to run into in person.
But I had a lot harder of a time with this one. This time I really did get kind of peeved at the incredulously long passages of narration in which McGee seems to be reciting a personal philosophy about women that reads as if it came straight from a pickup artist blog. John D. MacDonald and Ian Fleming seem to share a lot of commonalities in this regard, in that they are both amazingly outspoken and wrong in their incredibly shallow observations about the female race. McGee, however, is a lot less shameful than James Bond in his opinions about women, who to him usually fall into either the categories of "whores" or "frigids who need a good dicking to become full human beings again".
As I've already said, I still can overlook dated attitudes if the book is entertaining (I'm a lifelong fan of crime fiction for god's sake). But Darker Than Amber really just didn't hook me like the other books did. A lot of it is MacDonald's writing, which had previously been clean and zippy in that old-fashioned pulpy kind of way in his other books, but which here suddenly reads like concrete -- there were so many times that I totally lost the plot of what was going on, who was who, why McGee was doing what he was doing, or what the hell anything meant at all since he seems to have abandoned clarity for the purposes of literary stylistic obfuscation. I just didn't enjoy it. There were a couple of times I was ready to stop reading out of boredom but only forced myself to keep going because the damn thing is only 170 pages.
So if the rest of the books in the series from hereon in are like this, I just don't know if I want to give any more of them a chance, especially if I know that I'll definitely never be in the McGee cult like so many other readers I'd probably never like to run into in person.