Like Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, George Pelecanos' short novel
What it Was is a tale told by a narrator who is partial though he appears objective. Conrad's narrator, Marlowe, tells the story of Kurtz, who ventures into the African jungle and meets himself, and his fate. The hero of What it Was, Derek Strange, tells the story of his own journey into manhood and responsibility.
Readers of Pelecanos will know Strange from previous books, first
a trilogy where we met him as an older private detective working in Washington DC; then in
Hard Revolution, a book set during the Washington Riots of 1968, when Strange was a street cop. Strange is perhaps well-named for, like Kurtz, he is an anomaly in his environment - a black cop in a largely white police force. Throughout the sequence of books he sees himself as an outsider, which allows Pelecanos to throw an objective light on the environment in which he works. In other words, we side with Strange and see the situations he encounters 'from the outside'. This is emphasized in What it Was by the fact that Strange narrates the book as a long story to his friend Nick Stefanos ... ironically another character in a separate
series of books by Pelecanos.
