Patrick O’Hannigan reviews West Oversea over at The Paragraph Farmer. He makes some, shall we say, flattering comparisons.
Category Archives: Reviews
Tell No One, by Harlan Coben
Notice of personal appearance: I’ll be at the Norway Day celebration in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, with the Vikings on Sunday, from about 11:00 to 4:00 or so. They say the weather will be nice.
I appreciated Gone for Good so much that I immediately launched into reading Tell No One, which Harlan Coben wrote just before it. I suppose it was inevitable that I’d be a little let down. There’s nothing at all wrong with Tell No One. It’s a gripping, fast-paced thriller with engaging characters and plenty of surprises. But for some reason (perhaps just a subjective identification with one main character over another), I didn’t like it quite as much.
There are actually a lot of similarities in the set-ups of both stories. Gone for Good’s hero was a gentle do-gooder, a volunteer who works with the homeless, whose girlfriend disappears and who soon comes under the suspicion of federal investigators. In Tell No One, the hero is Dr. David Beck, a young physician who has voluntarily chosen to work with charity cases in Manhattan. Three years ago, he was gravely injured when his wife, Elizabeth, was abducted and murdered by a serial killer. But now he starts getting e-mail messages that seem to be coming from Elizabeth herself. Meanwhile, the FBI has suddenly decided that he must have murdered Elizabeth, and they’ve got a warrant for his arrest. But David has an appointment to meet with Elizabeth—or whoever’s pretending to be her—this afternoon, and there’s no way he’s going to be sitting in a cell when that happens. So he runs.
Very good story. I’ve got no complaints. The language is not bad for the genre; the violence (some of it quite horrifying) is mostly off camera. There is a lesbian couple with a child who are highly sympathetic characters, so you might (or might not) want to be warned of that.
I liked it, and I’ve got no legitimate complaint.
Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben
Oh my goodness, Gone For Good is a splendid novel.
I hate to blaspheme Andrew Klavan by calling it the best suspense novel I’ve ever read, but I’ll go so far as to say I’ve never read a better one.
Will Klein, the hero and narrator, is a do-gooder. He works in New York City for Covenant House a (real-life) humanitarian organization that tries to reach out to street kids and (when they’re lucky) help a few of them escape that world before they’re irreparably damaged (which doesn’t take long).
He lives with his girlfriend, Sheila. She’s his “soul-mate,” and he’s planning to propose soon. The only reason he put it off was because his mother died of cancer recently, and life got complicated.
It didn’t help that, shortly before her death, his mother told him his older brother Ken was still alive. Obviously she was just raving.
Ken had been Will’s hero as a boy, up until the day his girlfriend (Will’s former girlfriend) was found murdered, and Ken disappeared. The official assumption has been that Ken killed her and ran.
Believing his brother innocent, Will has always assumed he was also murdered, his body never found.
Then Sheila receives a mysterious phone call, leaves a note saying, “Love you always,” and vanishes completely.
Will has always been a passive guy (I identified with him heavily). But now, the weight of personal loss becomes too heavy to endure, and he sets out (with the help of his friend “Squares,” a millionaire yoga guru) to find the woman he loves. Quickly he learns that it has something to do with his brother’s disappearance. And we are given just enough glimpses (in Hitchcockian fashion) of the plans and deliberations of his enemies to understood the extreme danger he’s walking into. Very powerful, very ruthless people are interested in the whereabouts of Ken Klein. But even this information leaves plenty of surprises along the way. The twists come relentlessly, right up to a jaw-dropping revelation at the end.
What I loved about Gone For Good was that the plot and the surprises all rose from believable, complex characters. Coben understands Solzhenyitsin’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Every character in this book is flawed, but also well-meaning (by his own lights). The wide disparity between the things that individuals consider right and necessary is almost a part of the background scenery, like the Grand Canyon.
Outstanding. Recommended highly for adults.
I think she liked it
“Superfast Reader” at “Reading Is My Superpower” praises West Oversea to an extent that almost embarrasses me.
But not so much that I won’t share it with you.
The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor
I was trying to figure out why I feel so depressed today, and then I remembered that Al Franken is going to be my new senator.
In related news, the official Minnesota State Accessory is now the red rubber clown nose.
I decided to try reading a mystery by Steven Saylor on the recommendation of James Lileks (not, I probably ought to add, a personal recommendation, but one heard on the Hugh Hewitt Show). I’m glad I did, and I’ll be reading more. But they’re odd books.
The hero of The Venus Throw is Gordianus the Finder, an established private detective in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar. This story takes place in the year 56 BC, and is based on actual events.
Gordianus is visited, unexpectedly, by an acquaintance from the past, an old Egyptian philosopher named Dio, with whom he used to have informal dialogues when he lived as a young man in Alexandria. Dio explains that he is part of a delegation from Egypt which has come to petition the Roman Senate. One by one or in groups, most of the original 100 emissaries have been murdered or scared off. Dio asks Gordianus for just one favor—to do a sort of security check on the house where he is staying, so that he can eat the food without fearing poison.
Gordianus, very regretfully, has to refuse. Not only does the case involve political risks, but he is leaving on a trip to visit his oldest stepson (a soldier of Caesar’s in Gaul) the next day.
On his return from Gaul, Gordianus learns that Dio was murdered that very night. Continue reading The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor
The Children of Hurin, by J. R. R. Tolkien
(Yes, I finally got around to reading this book.)
The trouble with Tolkien’s Middle Earth writing, apart from The Lord of the Rings, is the acute lack of hobbits. It’s hard to carry off the high heroic tone for a modern audience without offering non-heroic, funny intermediaries with whom the modern reader can identify. The moment I came up with the character of Father Aillil for my Erling books, I understood that the books could work. Modern readers find purely heroic characters and situations kind of clunky. I say it to our shame, but there are few old-style heroes among us (I’m talking about a whole cultural ethic here, not people who do heroic things), and we experience culture shock when we encounter such characters.
I’m not saying The Children of Húrin fails for this reason. I read it with great enjoyment. But you should be prepared for a rather different experience than what you get from Tolkien’s masterwork. If you’ve read The Silmarillion, you know what I mean, and indeed you will have read this story already, in a different form.
The Children of Húrin has been compared to an Icelandic saga. That’s true, if you’re thinking of the high heroic sagas, like the Volsunga Saga, sagas about heroes of old who were larger than life in every way—braver, crueler, more passionate than you and I.
Húrin is not the hero of this book, but his story frames it. At the beginning we learn how he earns the enmity of Glaurung, the evil dragon, who curses him and his family, then forces him to sit watching on a mountain as the curse works itself out. At the end he reappears for a brief epilogue.
The central character is his son Túrin, who (as the Vikings would have put it) has every good quality except for luck. Mighty and brave in battle, devoted to his family and friends, he nevertheless takes every wrong turn. He makes disastrous choices, trusts the wrong people, is offended by his best friends and offends those who should be his allies. In the end the dragon’s curse works itself out in his personal relationships, in a manner worthy of Greek tragedy (something Tolkien imposes on the saga form here, like the recent movie, “Beowulf”). Pity and terror are here in full measure.
I enjoyed it a lot, but it wasn’t lighthearted reading.
Recommended for serious-minded readers. I think it would be all right even for younger teens, if they’re mature.
“The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford”
Just got an e-mail today from a reader (not of West Oversea, but of The Year of the Warrior) who thanked me for it somewhat ruefully. This person said that the story had given them the courage to turn down an employment opportunity which would have involved violating their conscience.
I am not a good enough man to have this effect on people.
I saw the movie, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” on DVD over the weekend. It’s one of those movies that got dynamite reviews but never received the distribution it deserved. And it must be admitted that it’s not popcorn fare.
I read the book it was based on, written by Ron Hansen, way back in the ’70s, when it first came out. As best as I can tell at this distance, the movie follows the novel pretty closely. Continue reading “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford”
The Last Thing I Remember, by Andrew Klavan
Andrew Klavan’s The Last Thing I Remember is his first young adult thriller. That doesn’t mean a grizzled old man like me can’t enjoy it, though, and I did.
Nobody sets up a grabber opening like Klavan, and it would have been hard to better this one. As the story begins, we find our hero, high school junior Charlie West, waking up strapped to a heavy metal chair, in a room full of torture instruments. He has wounds and burns that he can’t remember getting. In fact, the last thing he remembers is a fairly ordinary day of school (which turns out, on closer examination, to have been not so ordinary at all). Outside the door, he hears men talking, and the one in charge says, “Kill him.”
Now we both know they won’t succeed at that, because otherwise there’d be no book. What follows is a two-stranded story—Charlie describes his desperate escape and his attempts to get back home and avoid the police (who are hunting him), alternating with his memories of that “ordinary” last day—the karate demonstration he did for a school assembly (he has a black belt, and it’s a good thing, too), working up the nerve to talk to a pretty girl and getting her phone number, a session at the dojo and a talk with an estranged friend, work on a history paper, and bed.
The formula for a good thriller is to put your hero in an impossible situation and find ways for him to survive and reach his goals, even though the impossible situation gets even worse. Klavan hits every stop, and the story just speeds along. It seemed too short, and now I’ll have to wait a whole year to find out what comes next.
Charlie is a Christian and a patriot, and just the kind of hero you want your kids to have.
I have some minor quibbles. Charlie frequently draws strength from a quotation from Winston Churchill that he got from his karate master—“Never give in, never give in… never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense….” It gets a little didactic, but of course this is a young adult novel, and you almost have to do that if you want to teach the reader anything. Nuance doesn’t go very far with younger readers.
I found that lesson a little painful, personally. The principle’s a good one, but there are a lot of people out there—especially young people—who aren’t in a position to act as Charlie does. These people are in situations where they literally have no power, and trying to “never give in” will only make their situations worse. I know, because I was one of those kids once.
But that’s something that’s probably more significant to me than to most people. This is a book you’ll want your son or daughter to read (mild violence, no sex or bad language), and you’ll enjoy reading it too. A lot.
Praise from (Sid) Caesar
Anthony Sacramone, late of Strange Herring, alerts me (in a comment on my dyspeptic post below about his hiatus) to his review, just posted, of my The Year of the Warrior, over at First Things blog.
If he knew how deeply I appreciate such fulsomosity, especially in view of the source, it would inflate his already prodigious ego to a level almost unimaginable to our pure-minded readership.
So I won’t say anything about it.
Winter Haven, by Athol Dickson
I raised a small controversy in this space a little while back, when I gave a less than enthusiastic (though positive) review to Athol Dickson’s The Cure.
I liked his Winter Haven considerably better, though I still have a couple reservations.
I criticized The Cure for offering a weak sister protagonist for whom I found it hard to root. No such problem with Winter Haven. The protagonist here is Vera Gamble, a Texas accountant whose nearly obsessive-compulsive passion for numerical balance drives her to go to any lengths to rectify the imbalances in her own life. She has lost her mother (to cancer) and her autistic brother (he just disappeared one day), and finally her father, whose abusive religious teachings drove her to never, never, never ask God why He let anything happen. Now she’s received word that her brother’s body has washed up on a beach on the Maine island of Winter Haven. When she makes her way there to take him home, she discovers that, although thirteen years have passed since his disappearance, he looks precisely the age he was when he ran away.
The story unfolds in the classic manner of a Gothic novel (and a good one). The island residents seem oddly hostile, and they are greatly disturbed when their (unwritten and unexplained) rules about where she may go and what she may do are transgressed. A handsome sea captain who lives alone in a crumbling mansion is the one who discovered her brother’s body. He has recently announced the discovery of Viking artifacts, which (trust me on this), if verified as being discovered on this island, would mean a huge historical breakthrough. But is his story true? Why won’t he show anyone where he found them? What is he hiding? And what is the strange, inhuman voice that Vera hears everywhere, speaking almost-intelligible words?
I found the mystery fascinating. Winter Haven is a genuine page-turner.
Maybe it’s just me, but I thought Dickson tied everything up a little too neatly at the end. The theme of answered questions, and mysteries explained, is central to the book, but I (personally) find too much resolution a little unbelievable. In my own books, I like to leave a few threads untied, because life’s like that.
But that’s my only quibble. I recommend Winter Haven.