Sonny, a drunken convenience store clerk living uneasily in a relationship with twin sisters, woke up naked and blue. Not sad, but actually blue from head to toe.
A warped warning from a former CIA colleague? A message from a deranged hit man that he and those he loves are marked for death? Or is his blueness a more invidious omen?
Sonny's search for answers will lead him to a perverse reconciliation with his former bloody role in geopolitics - and his destiny - on the bloody trail to Chiapas.
Along the way he will befriend a people struggling to survive, reconsider the nature of terrorism and the drug trade, and decipher an ancient Mayan vision of the end of time.
He will also meet another former CIA operative who doubles as a jaguar shaman, a Mayan holy man whose prophesies include Sonny, and a mysterious boy whose role in his people's future is both mythic and deadly.
Sonny's flashbacks to his gore-stained government work in Mesoamerica, including the act for which he was 'excommunicated', constitute proof of power's inhumanity, but his darkest revelation is that violence and greed are the true mechanisms of history.
Michael McIrvin's high-octane, intelligent novel is an immaculately researched, powerful indictment of brutal counterintelligence, including torture and murder, an exploration of how ends are achieved by a nation-state. This book is frighteningly timely.
I just finished reading The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time, and I am deeply impressed. This novel from tiny and obscure BeWrite Books, this epitaph for a culture of banal consumerism, culturally sanctioned greed and deliberate self-insulation from the darkest forms of violence and destruction, deserves a prominent place in contemporary American literature. Michael McIrvin has created a place so jaded and dark that even the tiniest flicker of light is almost blinding in its revelations. And he does it with an enviable mastery of language. The most frightening thing about this fable is that in its heart of darkness lies a reality that plays itself out in the lives of real people, right now, in many parts of the world. The beauty of the book is in its crafting. The story compels you briskly forward and yet, along the way are turns of phrase and insight that stop you in your tracks.
John W. Schouten
What an extraordinary book! I read The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time at the suggestion of a friend who belongs to a reading group called the Noir Mongers (they meet at a bar every Tuesday, which indicates much about their sensibilities). Bill told me the Mongers were blown away by this noir thriller, but he said, he and his fellow hard-drinking readers were hard-pressed for words to equal the experience. He wanted a literary type like me to explain the book to them as succinctly as possible, but I am not sure I could explain this excellent novel sufficiently if I filled volumes.
It is not that McIrvin's story is difficult to follow, and in fact, the plot is just complex enough to be damned interesting: the main character is a former CIA agent forcibly drafted by other former CIA agents to do a terrible job in Mexico, and he wants revenge for a murdered lover but must do what these guys want or another lover will be killed. And the novel does indeed have all the characteristics of a great noir thriller: a first-person narrator whose guilt is obvious and whose shifting state of mind is central to the tale, whose role moves from victimizer to victim to avenger (to something far more in this case); a question of identity (actually, several such questions); suspense arising from the protagonist's involvement in menacing events; an environment of fear and anxiety, of degraded values in which right and wrong become interchangeable; socio-political critique; and so on. But this novel steps far beyond these characteristics too, or rather, dives into them so deep that the book transcends easy classification or succinct discussion.
Much good noir fiction is merely an echo of old Roman revenge plays, of course, and in fact, the main character, Sonny, mentions the works of Seneca at one point and declares himself "all bloody purpose.malevolent intent incarnate." However, the very best noir achieves the level of Greek tragedy, becoming as much about destiny and the social order as it is about vengeance. The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time is definitely in this category but a very modern version.
For example, the issue of Sonny's identity is symbolized by the fact that this is not his real name, and in fact his real name is never revealed. He simply settled on this identity as part of his attempt to start over after his stint as a CIA agent, and he seems to be trying to live down to the expectations that come with it. But the bigger question of identity is represented by his code name in his agency days: Blue. Sonny heard an array of associations in the name, in fact our collective romanticized idea of America itself in its many implications, but he discovered his employers heard something else entirely, something bleak and menacing. The reader's first hint this book has bigger aspirations than typical noir is Sonny's notion that he completely bought into the specifically American archetype of the hero (as gunslinger, as patriot), and hence his idealized notion of his code name. But when he became one version of an American hero, an agent in the service of U.S. nationalism, he discovered the truth: that identity generally is at best an ever-shifting class marker and at worst an illusion, that "hero" is another word for killer, torturer, and destroyer of cultures (yea, big themes, and they come up within the first 30 pages).
Likewise, Sonny's guilt is not just an excuse for mayhem. He never once tries to avoid responsibility for his bloody acts, and in fact he carries his guilt like a penitent if not a martyr. At one point, when someone he loves is murdered merely to get his attention, he says like a mantra, "My fault, my fault, my fault." His guilt is complex too, first a question of destiny and then of socio-political exigency and propaganda, but ultimately we are all implicated in the bloody process of history, which makes this book one of the more extraordinarily grim noir literary novels ever written - and that is saying something given the many harsh additions to the category in recent years (think David Peace). To make discussion even more difficult, this tale is told in a language that is at once disconcertingly poetic and uncompromisingly realistic. Imagine Heart of Darkness as run through Blood Meridian as if told by Don Delillo channeling Ray Chandler channeling Sartre.
And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It is no wonder my friend and the other beer-swilling Noir Mongers were nonplussed. Sonny is part tragic hero and part existential antihero and part symbolic everyman laboring under the delusions foisted upon him by his culture, and his quest is into a heart of darkness that is Western Civilization itself. In a word, the questions this book raises are enormous, and then, the author provides frightening answers to those questions (for example, the boy named Hurricane is, by turns, funny in a macabre way and more darkly symbolic than any character in recent literature).
All while entertaining the hell out of anyone who has the courage to read great literature that is also a morality tale for our age, and which is also a great noir thriller that is maybe best enjoyed with a beer in one hand.
I repeat, The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time is an incredible novel. I am about to read it again, and then I am going to call Bill.
Dylan Neal
The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time is billed as noir thriller, but there is infinitely more to this book. Sonny, a former CIA agent in hiding for the last couple of decades for killing his partner to save a salsa singer the paranoid partner thought an enemy agent, is recruited by former agents to terrorize Mayan tribesmen so they will agree to sell their ancient trees to a timber consortium. His former colleagues' methods are anything but subtle and include murder, and Sonny has little choice on a few fronts: a dead girlfriend whose sister will be next and the not-so-small problem of a systemic concoction that has turned him blue, literally, and only the bad guys have the antidote.
On his way to noir-type vengeance, Sonny offers the reader a glimpse into his past, which includes murder and torture, and thus the CIA's methods at least since Viet Nam. The reader is also asked to think about terrorism, what it is in real terms and the third-worlders who resort to it, the role of the US in the political violence in Central and South America, the role of tribal cultures in history, the drug war and drug trafficking relative to powerlessness, the hero archetype as propaganda, state power and how the young are inculcated into the culture of violence McIrvin associates not only with nations but also with corporations, the awful means by which history stumbles forward, and much else (like modern art and industrial jobs and family and identity).
McIrvin's novel is a hell of a read and a hell of a ride, through hell, actually. The story moves at the speed of light, but you will find yourself haunted by the world the book describes, our modern world, long after you turn the last page.
Tim Smith
If you’ve ever wondered why the most heavily fortified embassies throughout the world belong to the USA this tale will give you the answer. Here we are presented with the beyond-Machiavellian antics of the CIA, those covert/overt representatives of a USA that we from elsewhere, and patently many within the USA - Michael McIrvin is a norteño - have come to know and hate. (Loathe is too passive a verb.)
An ex-CIA operative wakes up in an alley naked and blue. Blue all over. He wasn’t blue before he fell asleep, except for his one-time code name. Sickened by CIA-authored atrocities in Guatemala, drawn to Mayan folk tales, taunted by a shaman, he fled, has spent the last 20 years on the run from the CIA, the last year shacked up with two sisters, switching - with their blessing - between the pair.
Chandler’s mean streets lead to D H Lawrence’s Plumed Serpent, Crime and Punishment meets wholly amoral Truth and Death. For this is an extended meditation on Death, its centrality both to Mayan and, yes, to Western culture, our news primarily concerned with killings, calamity deaths, wars, the importance of events measured by the number or status of the dead. X-Box killing games, murder mysteries. . . . Snuff movies?
How exactly to define this tale? A spy-thriller? Once he has been found, and turned blue, our narrator knows that the CIA have found him and that they mean to kill him. Or is assassination not their intent? Do they mean to re-recruit him? The Guatemalan shaman reappears .....and there are flashbacks to CIA-inspired mayhem and torture methods. Ideology of sorts plays its part, so too the making of myth.
Told in the first person with many a digression, I couldn’t make up my mind whether to describe his blueness as an extended metaphor or his return to the killing lands as a taut allegory. Suffice to say it has its Hamlet-type ponderings, a consideration of Life through the many lens of Death, although at a far less leisurely pace than that employed by the graveside Prince of Denmark. And deeper than this, ". . . .a pose of thought by an automaton who plots and plans but does not think in the truest sense of the word . . . ." We are given plenty to think on here, not least the superficiality and inherent destructiveness of our Western way of life.
Comes a senseless killing. Or a killing whose only motive was to intimidate. Our narrator/hero goes looking for revenge, the plot thickens . . . . and all hell breaks loose.
© Sam Smith July 6th 2010
