Does it really count as a book review when you explain why you tossed the book aside less than half way through? Because that’s what I did with Jeffery Deaver’s The Vanished Man.
I was not disappointed with the author’s skill. He writes a good story, creates a tight plot. His characters are well realized.
No, I just didn’t like the points he was trying to make, and I didn’t want to waste any more time on them.
The Vanished Man is a well-crafted thriller with a clever premise. What if a master magician became a serial killer? What if he felt compelled to re-create the feats of famous escape artists like Houdini, except that he stages them with innocent victims, leaving them no avenue of escape? And what if he were skilled in quick changes, illusion and lock-picking, so that even when the police have him surrounded, he can slip away from them?
That’s the promising scenario of The Vanished Man.
But Deaver lost me as a reader. I doubt if he cares. He clearly despises people like me, and wouldn’t want us for readers.
For instance, I’m a sexist pig. I don’t believe women (in general) make as good policemen as men. I believe men have both an obligation and a psychological need to protect women, and that putting women in harm’s way debases both them and the men.
In Deaver’s world, about half the cops are women, and any suggestion that a guy thinks even for a moment that women don’t make equally effective cops proves that he’s a Neanderthal.
There’s a conservative Protestant pastor in the novel, and at the beginning he seems to be portrayed pretty sympathetically. This immediately made me suspicious, and I was right to be. A little further in, we learn that the pastor is a child molester, and that he’s in New York City to perform a political assassination on behalf of a right-wing militia group.
That was when I lost interest.
Nobody pays me to read these books, and I don’t have unlimited time left in my life. I’m not going to spend that time reading fiction that insults me.
No doubt some people feel the same about my books.
Fair enough.
You know, I’m not sure I would put the book down for those reasons, but maybe I would. It’s hard to say. I finished reading a pretty unsatisfying mystery a couple years ago, but then I wanted to review it here so I felt I needed to. Still, I didn’t like it. It wasn’t insulting, just unentertaining.
Funny you should bring up the psychological need of a man to protect… I just finished reading The Foundling by Francis Cardinal Spellman (c. 1951), and one of the bits that jumped out at me was where a soldier, just getting stateside after having his face mangled and losing his arm in World War I, finds an abandoned infant, and picking it up and holding it, “Paul laughed softly. For the first time since that terrible day when he looked upon himself, fear-frozen, in the hospital mirror in France, he sensed a feeling akin to joy. For he was exercising a privilege he thought forever lost to him – the man-privilege of drawing someone close within the circle of his arm and protecting her. Or was it him?”
I’d never heard it put like that, and it stopped me in my tracks.
The book itself is a bit hard to sum up quickly. It’s got drop dead funny sections, but also gut-wrenching sections. It follows the lives of vastly different boys and men whose lives intersect because that soldier found that baby. Overall, a very good book, one that took on many of the issues of the day without being overbearing or clunky about it. A good read, but a challenging one, too.
Sounds good.
I haven’t read any Deaver books, though his name sounds familiar. But I’ll skip this one. I didn’t respond previously, when you reviewed the Bill Pronzini book, but I stopped reading Pronzini because of his constant back-hand to Christians. I did try, reading perhaps half of his works, before I quit. But the Christians in Pronzini’s books are invariably portrayed as hypocrites or worse, and it got old.
That’s interesting. I hadn’t caught that (I generally read Pronzini when I can find him, which makes his books few and far between. Maybe I’ve been lucky in my choices).
I’ve only read one book by Pronzini and that was enough for me. (It was called Lonesome Blue, or something similar.) I thought it was radically anti-christian in spirit. The villain was a pastor who sexually abused his daughter, etc. (And the hero was an accountant from San Francisco!)I don’t of course deny that professed christians do evil things… but I got the impression this was a way for P. to vent on people he doesn’t like. In any event I thought it was a very poor novel.
You know, I read Lonesome Blue too, but I’ve forgotten it entirely. I very likely had the same reaction as you, and then forgot about it.