Author: Robert A. Parker

Robert A. Parker, a retired writer and editor, currently writes the blog, A Literary Cavalcade, that offers reviews of 20th and 21st century fiction. His past reviews, written over six decades, have been published in six volumes, also called A Literary Cavalcade. His commentaries on cultural subjects have appeared in America, The Critic, Sign, Communication Arts, Americas, Vuelta, and other publications. He has designed, edited, and written 20 volumes that summarize the Parker family’s literary and photographic careers.

Someone to Run With, by David Grossman

This is a fine novel from 2000 about two teenagers caught in the underworld of Jerusalem. It begins: “A dog runs through the streets, a boy runs after it.” The boy, Assaf, belongs to a poor family, and has a summer job with the city. The dog, a yellow Lab, is Dinka, and belongs to the teenage girl, Tamar. Actually, she has lost the dog before the novel begins, and on the opening pages Assad is following the dog as she seeks out her mistress’ former haunts.

We thus confront a simple beginning, but a complicated novel, complicated because its story does not does not flow in sequence. It is told in different time frames, switching us back and forth between Assaf and Tamar. And to compound the confusion that Tamar’s story has happened before Assaf’s begins, we learn in progressively slow stages why Tamar and Assaf are even doing what they are doing. Indeed, Tamar’s story has nothing to do with her dog. Dinka is simply with Tamar as the girl attempts to join an underground street gang for, at first, unknown reasons. In sum, it is not easy to adjust to the fact that the first story, Assaf’s, is actually happening after the story of Tamar, which soon dominates the novel.

And so while we begin with Assaf running through the streets behind Dinka, who is looking for her mistress, it is really Tamar who is the main character, as well as a more complex character. At first, we do not even know why she wishes to catch the attention of the gang, why she wants to be invited to join it. Slowly, we gather that she wishes to rescue someone in the gang and that she is desperate to do so. But all we know about this gang is that it is run by hard-nosed Pesach, a Russian thug who distributes drugs and sends young runaways out into the streets to perform and collect donations, while gang leaders pick the pockets of those who stop to listen or watch.

But Tamar realizes that the only way she can get inside the gang is to be invited, and so she offers her talent as a brilliant singer. It is a dangerous decision, for once you are in the gang it is difficult to leave. And we do not understand her decision to join, moreover, until she starts planning the rescue. And only when we know whom she wishes to rescue do we realize the reason for her commitment. Much less, the difficulty she faces in rescuing this victim who has been seduced through drugs into joining the gang.

Meanwhile, we keep switching into the future to follow Assaf as Dinka leads him to clue after clue in the search for her owner. And Assaf himself receives, like the reader, a tour of seedy Jerusalem and an introduction to a range of unusual characters. These alternate time frames are somewhat confusing for a while, but each teenager is so well drawn (Tamar, an extrovert, older and wiser than her years, and the introvert Assaf, an innocent confronting the darker side of the city), that both come alive in their world of self-doubt. And so well captured is the desperation of the victims Tamar finds caught in the gang, and so well captured is Assaf’s innocence as he encounters Jerusalem’s unknown world, that we are caught up in both their tales.

What is most remarkable about this novel is that the two main characters meet only at the novel’s climax. Otherwise, they do not know that each other exists. Yet in their yearning, in their search for fulfillment, in their idealism, they seem meant for each other, and the reader cannot wait for them to finally meet. But, of course, the entire structure of the novel has been created to keep them apart. They exist, after, all in two time frames.

This becomes a story of love on many levels. It begins with Dinka’s love of her mistress, as well as Tamar’s love of her dog. It is even more Tamar’s love of her family, since the main action of the novel is built around both the rescue of a loved one and her effort to weed him from drugs. And, finally, there is the burgeoning love of Tamar and Assaf, as each finds in the other what has been missing from their lives, essentially a tenderness that breaks through the hard shell they have built around themselves to survive.

As for love at the family level, it exists in both Tamar’s and Assaf’s family, even though a few do not recognize it. There is even love within the gang’s victims, especially between Tamar and her roommate Sheli. And Assaf has his friend Rhino, who will play a crucial role at the end.

That ending, in fact, is for me the only mis-step in the novel. It is too dramatic, almost soap-operatic, in its turn of events. In particular, its drama contrasts with the development of a tender relationship between Tamar and Assaf, a relationship that seems headed for love, until rudely interrupted. And I was not convinced by either that interruption or the fortuitous rescue that followed. At least, the novel ends on a grace note, as Grossman returns to the possibility of love. The last sentence reads: “Tamar noticed that she had never met a person she felt so comfortable being silent with.”

While some have considered this a young adult novel, the Germans even honoring it as such, it is also a valid adult novel. It simply has two teenage protagonists. And if the movement is fast-paced, to appeal to a younger audience, the novel also probes its characters’ interior lives as well as tension within the contemporary Jewish society in which they live.

Grossman has also been criticized for continuously withholding information from the reader. To enhance the suspense. To entice younger readers who are more interested in plot than in character. The Times reviewer Claire Messud writes: “As readers, we are being toyed with.” She also writes of the author’s manipulation of his two heroes: “Where are the parents of these young people? Why aren’t their surrogate guardians more attentive?… Grossman’s tale requires that Tamar and Assaf be independent agents in order that they may fulfill their respective quests and (inevitably) find each other.”

To me, this is accurate, but unfair. We would not have a story if the lead characters were not on their own. They would not have the independence that leads them to one another. Nor the recognition that they complement one another. We would have an adventure story without a love story. We would have a young adult novel rather than an adult novel. This is not Grossman’s only novel, incidentally, about the search for love. (September. 2016)

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

This 2014 work is a serious and ambitious novel. Its theme is the casualness and cruelty of war. And especially its impact on children, the innocent. It is a story of World War II, and deliberately focuses on one French child and one German child. Both are good children as well as innocent, and the point is that they suffer equally. For war is the villain, not the Germans, much less the French.

In alternating chapters, we witness the story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig. Marie-Laure is sixteen and blind, when the novel reaches its climax in August, 1944, at the ancient walled city of Saint-Malo. Werner is two years older, skilled at radio communication, and stationed in occupied Saint-Malo. Their meeting will occur only at the end of this novel.

These two children are helpless in the tide of history. But the novel begins ten years earlier, when Marie-Laure has just turned blind from cataracts, and Werner, having lost his father in a mine accident, is moved to a primitive orphan’s home with his sister Jutta. Marie-Laure is the daughter of the lockmaster of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. To enable his daughter to move around their neighborhood, he has built a miniature model of its streets, parks, and buildings. He also holds the key to the vault of a precious diamond, called the Sea of Flames, which is a significant plot element in the novel. Werner, meanwhile, is a sensitive child fascinated by radios, and he struggles against the brutality of his teachers and classmates.

Both are caught up by the war. Marie-Laure flees with her father as the Germans advance on Paris, and ends up in Saint-Malo, where her father builds her another model so she can move around that city. He also carries with him one of four versions of the Sea of Flames that the French have created to hide the real one from the Germans. Werner, meanwhile, has been recognized for his expertise with radios and has been drafted first into a technical school and then into the army. In the army, his radio unit serves in Poland, Russia, Austria, and finally, as Allied forces cross the channel, France. There this sensitive boy endures the horrors of war, but finds an understanding colleague in Sergeant Frank Volkheimer.

The reader knows these two children will come together, but both stories are so well and so sensitively told that he is rarely impatient. Doerr does create suspense, however, by opening his novel in August, 1944, with both Marie-Laure and Werner trapped in rubble after an Allied bombing. He then returns periodically to their dire situation, making the reader eager to learn not so much how they will meet as how they will survive. Not to mention how the fate of the diamond will affect them—if it is the real one.

That diamond is another unifying element. Legend has it that its possessor will live forever, but all those around him will die, and this does seem to account for the fate of many characters when one reviews the novel’s events. Indeed, the fate of the diamond itself, which ends up hidden inside one of the model houses, actually requires careful reading. Suspense also enters when Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel has been assigned to find the true diamond on behalf of Adolf Hitler. The sergeant is dying of a tumor; and finding the diamond will, he believes, enable him to survive. Suspense grows as each diamond he tracks down is a false one, and as he gets closer to finding the model house. But his own story is peripheral to the novel’s main story.

Times’ reviewer Vollman objects to the presence of this diamond, but I believe it is also a metaphor for the novel—for both the survival of some characters and the casual death of others. That is, it is a symbol of the permanence of life but the arbitrariness of death. At the very end, in 2014, the elderly Marie-Laure compares the electro-magnetic waves Werner loves to the souls of the dead of this novel. “[Might they not] fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough?…the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.” This is also the world, the light, of the title that we cannot see.

The major achievement of this novel is its portrayal of the blind Marie-Laure. We experience her life as she does, through her remaining four senses, especially that of hearing. But she is also a sensitive, intelligent, and brave girl, and there is a fascinating parallel between her own trapped situation and the trapped characters in her favorite novel, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. At the end, for example, she is reading it over the radio when she thinks she may well die—and it becomes her first contact with Werner, when he hears her voice over his own radio.

Werner himself, with his own sensitivity amid the cruelty around him, with his special skill with radios, and with his love for his sister Jutta, is a full creation, but not at the level of Marie-Laure. After operating almost an automaton in the army, as he traces illegal radio transmissions and sees those operating them killed, he is traumatized by the death of an innocent Austrian girl and her mother. Feeling guilty, he opens his heart when confronted by the innocence of another girl, Marie-Laure. This about-face is a major character transformation, but it works.

Doerr breaks two rules of novel-writing here, and both also work. First, he writes in the present tense. Proof perhaps that it works is that I was unaware of it. Usually, it is used to convey immediacy, but perhaps it is also used here because Marie-Laure is blind and lives in the present tense, in the world of her remaining senses. Second, the novel is written in the form of very short chapters, often two or three pages. But this blends in with the sense of immediacy, for once a scene ends the author is finished with it, and moves on to a new scene, a new development.

This novel certainly prompts me to seek out more of Doerr’s work. But one suspects such work will be quite different. He supposedly put ten years into this work, and certainly it reveals considerable research to recreate the era of World War II, one retreat across France and another across Eastern Europe, and finally the description and the destruction of Saint-Malo. Indeed, the creation of the model neighborhoods within both Paris and Saint-Malo become another metaphor for this entire novel. (September, 2016)

The Children Act, by Ian McEwan

This 2014 work is a perfect little novel. It is short in length and simple in its story of Judge Fiona Maye. But it is perfect in its structure and rich in its meaning. The richness is in its exploration of the justice that Fiona has to administer. And the perfection is in her personal story that contrasts to the blind administration of justice. An administration that must leave aside the emotions that follows Fiona down every courtroom corridor.

When we meet Fiona, she has been told by her husband Jack that he still loves her, does not want to leave her, but that he wants to have an affair with a younger woman, not least because he and Fiona have not made love for two months and he needs one more fling at ecstasy. She becomes very angry at this proposed betrayal, although we can see she feels a certain guilt at having ignored his feelings for the sake of her career.

And that career is a fascinating one. She is a British High Court judge who has been assigned to handle family disputes, and we are led to understand how deeply she is caught up in her legal career by following her consideration of two disputes. In one case, a Jewish father wishes to raise two daughters within his conservative community, while his wife desires a more liberal education that will prepare the girls for today’s world. In another case, Siamese twins are born to a Catholic family; and both will die, unless there is an operation that will kill one baby in order that the other may survive.

What makes these cases so alive is that Fiona evaluates both sides of each dispute, understands why different parts of a family feel the way they do, and balances the good and the bad that will result from her support for either argument. And, as a result, one is not sure of her decision until the time she gives it. Nor is it lost on the reader that while her decisions tend to favor the liberal side in each controversy, she confronts her personal issue with her husband from a more traditional perspective.

But while her dispute with her husband permeates her thinking throughout the novel, it is another family dispute that dominates this book. It concerns Adam, the teenage son of a Jehovah’s Witness couple. He is seriously ill, and needs a blood transfusion to survive, but both he and his parents say a transfusion will be against their faith, that the bible says God has decreed that no one is to allow a foreign substance (such as another person’s blood) to enter their bodies.

The novel’s title comes from an actual act of Parliament that all legal decisions regarding children must consider first the welfare of the child. And “welfare,” of course, can be interpreted in many ways, depending on the given situation. And a major strength of this novel is the depth with which this conflict between religion and the state is explored. Like the confect between religion and science, it is a common theme in McEwan’s novels. Indeed, the conflicts here, first with Jewish parents and then Catholic parents seems deliberate.

But each evaluation here is so balanced on either side that neither the reader (forgetting that we are reading McEwan) nor Fiona is sure what her decision is going to be. Whereupon, she makes a major decision that will join Adam’s issue to that of her own personal dispute with her husband. It is a literary decision, of course, by author McEwan, for two such major themes need to come together. But it is also a personal decision that will have a major impact on her life, when she decides she must meet the young Adam.

For she becomes attached to him as a person. In fact, she sees him as the son that she and her husband were too busy to have. And Adam, in responding to her attention, becomes more real to the reader, making her decision about him still more important. But, more significantly, he begins pursuing her, thinking he has discovered her love, whereas it is only her compassion.

And so the novel moves toward the resolution of the two situations: both Fiona with her husband, and Fiona with Adam. There is a certain contrast in those resolutions, but both do work for me. Not least because one affects the other. Other critics, however, have felt the original juxtaposition is too calculated, and not realistic. But I see it as the author’s premise. What would happen to this highly intellectual judge when confronted by an emotional situation?

I might also note that religion does not often come out on top in McEwan’s work. In Adam’s case, even a little irony is involved in his final decision. But because he and the people in Fiona’s other cases are treated so understandingly as human, I can go along with the outcomes here. For most of these characters hold to their beliefs with complete sincerity. What is missing from McEwan’s presentations are the religious reasons behind these moral conflicts, but it is the conflicts that are at the heart of literature, not religious rationales.

Where the critics may be on sounder ground concerns the resolution of Fiona’s conflict with her husband Jack. In this case, I was not entirely convinced, perhaps because it involves a shift in Jack’s response and also introduces a certain convenience for these two characters. But the balance it offers to her judicial outcomes provides a certain literary justification. She has caused pain in one character, and it is not in her to cause pain in another.

What has impressed me, but not other critics, is the neatness with which McEwan has created these characters and this situation. Not the logical reality but the logical balance. It is what contributes to the “littleness” of this novel, its simplicity. It’s a simplicity that recalls for me Hersey’s A Single Pebble or Edmundo Desnoes’ Inconsolable Memories. That is, it is not a complex work, but it has complex ramifications, in this case the emotional impact on a rational being. It is not about the conflict between religion and science. It is about the conflict within one person when those two elements collide. (August, 2016)

The Snow Queen, by Michael Cunningham

Cunningham seems to have put two ideas together here in this 2014 novel. One is to recreate the difficulty of creating art, in this case composing songs rather than writing novels. And the second is to write a novel about the love of two men, except, not sexual love but brotherly love—a kind of love that may have intrigued this gay writer, and a kind seldom explored in literature.

But since there is an abstract aspect to these two ideas, a quietness that does not immediately grab reader interest, he introduces a mysterious light that one brother sees in the sky as he crosses New York’s Central Park. What can it mean?

And so we have the story of Tyler and Barrett Meeks. The older Tyler is living with girl friend Beth, who is dying of cancer, but he invites Barrett, a gay man and a victim of many unfulfilled love affairs, to live with them. It is this act of brotherly love, the relationship that it reveals, that is the prime achievement of this novel. Less significant are Liz, Beth’s older friend who has joined her in running a kind of used clothing shop, and Andrew, Liz’ lover, whom Barrett yearns for.

Nothing dramatic will happen in this novel. Indeed, one moment of drama, concerning Beth, is deliberately avoided. The result is more a portrait of a small group of people, no longer young and unable to find their station in life and unable to accept their fate, and yet who still yearn for something—for, we can fathom, the unachievable. The mysterious light that Barrett has seen at the start of the novel is often referred to, but it is more suggestive than real. It is perhaps intended to symbolize the yearnings of these characters, for fulfillment, but it plays no role in this novel beyond that of a maguffin.

I have been a fan of Cunningham in the past, in part because he has explored new literary grounds. But he does not do so here, despite his ability to write interesting scenes and interesting conversations, and to capture the yearnings of characters who are no longer young and yet are surrounded by the culture of youth in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Bottom line for me, this novel has been a disappointment.

The disappointment begins with the mysterious light, of which nothing is made except inconsequential musings, and it ends with a poetic musing that conveys a transient mood, but no conclusion to our story. In between is an ex-Catholic’s musings about a mysterious (not divine) presence in our characters’ lives, a presence that one brother avoids through drugs and another through sex. There is even a surprise, with the revelation of an affair between two of the characters, which is perhaps intended to reveal the desperation within each partner, but which seems to have no consequences—despite its inclusion in the poetic ending.           

The critics have liked this novel, but I have not. I cannot relate to characters who have lost their way, fail to find an answer in sex or drugs, or even a moment of religion, and revert at the end to a dream world apparently out of reach. Compassion is heartfelt, but not enough by itself. (August, 2016)

John, by Niall Williams

This 2008 work is a remarkable novel of the imagination. Williams has immersed himself in the minds, the bodies, and the souls of the Apostle John and his followers, around 100 AD. From the time he and they are exiled to Patmos, when John is an old man and blind, to his discovery of peace at Ephesus.

But throughout this period, disappointment and frustration lurk. For John, and his disciples, are waiting for the return of Jesus, his Second Coming. It is what sustains him in his old age, and what seems to hold together his disciples. The reader knows they are mistaken, of course, in awaiting Jesus’ return, but their faith, their belief in Him will culminate with the understanding, the transformation, that will provide fulfillment to their life, and to this novel.

From the very first chapter, I found myself immersed in the reality of this primitive era and the tender care with which John’s disciples look after their frail leader. Not to mention their deep faith as they ready themselves for the return of Christ, the only conclusion they can see that justifies their political exile on this desolate, rock-covered island.

Also evocative of this ancient era is the style Williams has chosen to tell his tale. It is highly poetic, as is his style in all his novels, but beyond being beautiful to read, it also serves to render quite natural the biblical world in which these characters live. Moreover, it is complemented by brief passages even more biblical in feeling when John recalls moments of his youth when he walked with Jesus.

But, of course, this is also a novel. And a novel needs more than style. There must be movement, must be tension that allows the characters to interact. Which, in turn, carries the reader ahead. And so an unexpected death early on confronts these holy men, followed by an innocent confrontation with the devil, and, finally, rebellion. Indeed, these dozen or so disciples become more human as half of them turn against their leader.

Their rebellious leader, Matthias, argues that if they are to be abandoned by a Jesus who does not return, then John cannot be believed, and so they are foolish to follow him. In this way, Matthias convinces his followers that he knows the true path to God, and that they should strike out on their own, establishing their own community. And realize that Matthias is closer to God than John ever was. It begins as an effective portrait of evil; but as it goes on, it seems quite an obvious one.

My assumption is that this rebellion is a fruit of the author’s imagination, and is part of his novelization of this portrait of John. In any event, it fits perfectly. It underscores the weakness, as well as the humanity, of these men who see themselves as servants of God. It also raises the issue of doubt, which many see today as a constant ingredient of faith. Indeed, the positive response of the remaining disciples makes their own faith stronger.

Williams has written that the germ of this book came to him when he was in the middle of another book. It came in the form of this question: what was John doing the day before he wrote the gospel? “I was looking for…the man not the Apostle,” he writes. “I was drawn to the human dimension, the idea that John was most likely the youngest of the Apostles, maybe even a teenager, and that the most significant event of his life happened then, that everything else is aftermath. His is by most agreed accounts the last of the four main gospels written. So, why does he wait so long?” And after considerable research he found himself “writing John’s experience of banishment, his disappointments in the world, and his long enduring. I am writing of belief from the inside where the doubts are.”

The climax of this novel certainly reflects Williams’ moment of inspiration. But it also reflects the depth of his research. For while the desolation of Patmos was comparatively easy to portray, the portrayal of

Ephesus is much more complex. For it was a bustling city, with merchants hustlers, and charlatans everywhere. Indeed, John can make no headway in this city of commerce—and succeeds only when there is a transformation within him. Which follow the intervention of nature…and also of God?

What was John doing before writing his gospel? He was recovering from an earthquake, recovering slowly, all the while still waiting for Jesus to return. But just as earlier, he had rediscovered the importance of love and been inspired to dictate scripture, so now a violent thunderstorm, with brilliant lightening, helps him to realize the importance of light, and how it symbolizes what Jesus brought to mankind and to the world. Which is when he is inspired to write his gospel.

But neither Williams nor the reader can forget the novel’s focus on Papias, the youngest disciple who from the beginning has served the apostle, being the youngest and the strongest. And at the climax, he as well as John is near despair at the failure of Jesus to return. Indeed, he is suffering further, for he has unwittingly contacted the plague in Patmos, and now is ashamed of his physical condition and his failure to serve his master.

When John is revived, however, after the storm, he at once cures Papias of the plague—on the last page. I think this a misstep by Williams, as if he cannot leave this young man near despair at the end, and must save him with a miracle. One suspects that Papias is a fictional character, and Williams wanted to give him a similar crisis at the end of this tale, but he could have given him another different fate—and not needed a miracle. If he was an historic figure, I apologize, but I still regret the author resorting to a miracle.

Overall, Williams was right to see his tale as a love story. It is a story of John’s love of Jesus, which motivates his entire life. But it also about his love of his disciples. And their love of God, yes, but even more their love of this aged, infirm man whom they support and guide, and refuse to desert.

This novel once again demonstrates Williams’ beauty of style on one level and depth of humanity on another. It is a depth that stems from his recognition of and commitment to the spiritual nature of man. I shall certainly continue reading him. (August, 2016)

The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano

This 1998 work is a provocative novel, and a perplexing one. Yet it is also fascinating. It is fascinating because it is about writers, poets, and artists, and their lives. In fact, its fine reviews by critics has been, I think, influenced by that factor. For they, as I, can relate to these characters who struggle to survive but who live for their art, especially when it is a literary art. Of course, many also enjoy this work’s challenge to literary convention.

The novel is divided into three parts. The first part is a narrative journal by 17-year old Juan Garcia Madero, who is an ambitious poet and is invited to join an inconsequential poetry movement called visceral realists. He also ingratiates himself with the Font family, where the poetry movement often meets. At the end of this part, during a New Year’s party, he escapes in the Font family Impala with two founders of the poetry movement, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, plus a prostitute, Lupe. (It’s complicated: she’s fleeing her pimp.)

Let’s skip the second part for now. The third part is a continuation of the flight in the Impala by the four characters. They criss-cross northern Mexico, fleeing Lupe’s pimp, yes, but, more importantly, seeking to discover what happened to a woman named Caesarea Tinajero, who was a forerunner of their poetry movement. It is a journey that seemingly has no further purpose than to provide a context for that poetry movement and to flesh out the obstinate pursuit of Lima and Belano. But it also completes the story of Garcia Madero, who has no role in the more significant part two of the novel.

Even the shoot-out at the end of part three fails to convey the tragedy it apparently intends, not least because of Bolano’s matter-of-fact style. And while some critics claim the futility of this out-of-sequence finale foretells the empty future of Lima and Belano that is to be the feature of part two, it leaves me more with a sense of Bolano’s futility in being able to bring a sense of completeness to his story. But Bolano is more interested, I think, in the reader completing his novel and seeing it as a whole. It is a modern view of literature, a rebellious view that helped make him famous, but a view that I find difficult to relate to.

The novel’s title apparently comes from part three’s search for the poet Tinajero. The three men, and Lupe, are the detectives. They are savage, however, only in the author’s eye, but they certainly are persistent, determined to find the missing poet. And some might say they are following clues as they drive back and forth across the Sonoran desert in their search. But I found the search itself to be less interesting than their persistence, and their final discovery of a fat unpoetic woman to be anticlimactic.

Part two of the novel, comprising 400 of the 577 pages, is the most important and most perplexing portion of the novel. It offers a portrait of the literary and art world of Mexico, as told by more than forty characters. And it was impossible, at least for me, to track these forty characters from one monologue to another. What Bolano focuses on through these characters are their encounters with Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano after their adventures in parts one and three. Their encounters take place across two decades, and occur not only in Mexico but also in Paris, Israel, Barcelona, and even San Diego. They also portray the many setbacks by these two poets in their search for personal and artistic fulfillment. And while there is no cohesive narrative, we gradually understand that these two poets are the main concern of this novel, not young Garcia Madero. And I suspect that Bolano does not worry if part one has led readers astray. He is a big-picture author, and undoubtedly wants the reader to work to understand his overall tale.

What is fascinating about these monologues is that many of them are complete short stories. And these stories encourage our sticking with such disparate monologues that have no connection with one another, only with their continuing revelations about the lives, often separate, of Lima and Belano. The narrators also differ in their view of the two men, often basing their conclusion on how much the men ask of them—such as money or a place to live— how superior to them the men act, and the final taste the men leave. And like the monologists themselves, we cannot tell if these two poets have become explorers of art or simply drug addicts.

One characteristic I noted in the journal entries of Garcia Madero, as well as in all the monologues, is that these narrators over and over say they do not recall the specifics of certain encounters. Such as the people involved, the sequence of events, etc. It is not one narrator that does this; it is all of them. This seems intended to enhance the elusiveness of the events surrounding both Lima and Belano, giving them a more abstract feel. Which is exacerbated, when we see Lima and Belano themselves only through the other characters and too briefly to establish any interacting relationship. The result gives almost a surreal effect to this elusive world that Bolano has created.

The poet Belano is obviously a nom-de-guerre for author Bolano, but the youthful Madero in Mexico City is also based on Bolano’s youth. For Bolano was himself a rebellious poet when young and led a somewhat dissolute life in Mexico before traveling, like Belano, to France and Spain. In fact, he died in Barcelona of liver disease at age 50. And so it is out of his own experiences that Bolano has created this youthful environment and its fascination with sex, power, literature, rebellion—and dreams of fulfillment abroad. Also appropriate is the colloquial style Bolano, and the translator, have given both Madero and the monologists. For while our heroes are poets, we never read their poetry, nor do the monologists use poetic expressions in their tales of Lima and Belano. Instead, they communicate their own down-to-earth perspectives of these poor but ambitious main characters.

This provocative work leaves me interested in one more Bolano work, his even longer 2666, which has earned even more praise. But I must give myself some space. Bolano’s world is too disparate, too conceptual for me to revisit it anytime soon. (August, 2016)

Purity, by Jonathan Franzen

This 2015 work is a confusing novel from a writer I have long admired. It is confusing because it moves back and forth among different characters and different time frames. It is a method authors often use today, chiefly to involve readers into figuring out what is going on and, not incidentally, to create suspense.

But I found myself asking too many questions. Who, for example, is the main character? Is it Pip (Purity), whom we encounter at the start of the novel. Is it Andreas Wolf, a German computer hacker whom we next meet in Berlin, and follow to Bolivia, where he is a WikiLeaks-type provocateur? Or is it Tom Aberant, an American journalist tied to Andreas by a crime and his investigative journalism web site, but who also endures a ten-year marriage to Anabel, a marriage of conflict that this reader also found difficult to endure.

Also, why do we meet Pip in the middle of her story? Why is her mother so afraid to tell her about her father? Why does Wolf entice Pip to come to Bolivia? What is the point of the disastrous marriage of Tom? What is the lasting connection between Tom and Andreas? Eventually, we do learn the answers to these question, but rather than work as teasers, these questions frustrated this reader, actually inhibiting his interest. As suggested, I am not a fan of presenting characters and their stories out of chronological sequence. What I wish is that the suspense come from the actions of the characters, and wondering what they will do next, not from wondering what the actions of the characters actually mean.

Franzen is obviously trying here to write a major novel of literature. A novel of generations. A novel of family hate and jealousy. A novel of relationships between parent and child. A psychological novel (the Killer who haunts Andreas). A novel of international scope and subterfuge. A novel of literary complexity and commercial surprise.

The ending, in particular, reflects that commercial aspect. Marriage partners reconnect, but there is no conclusive ending to their relationship. A love affair continues on also, but inconclusively. Perhaps the characters are intended to continue on in our minds, but one also wonder if they are being set up to continue in a sequel. Or is Franzen simply unable to imagine the future of these characters, once their basic drama has concluded?

The novel’s title. More than a name for Pip, it seems intended to be symbolic. There is a billion dollar inheritance being refused. Does that reflect a sense of purity? There is truth being hidden and being exposed. About a nuclear bomb, about a murder, about a paternity. Is hacking in the interest of truth, and is that for reasons of purity, as Andreas pretends it is? There is even a suicide that, for me, comes out of nowhere. Of course, it is Pip’s mother who named her, and she is living her own interpretation of a life of purity. But the title seems meant to go beyond that, and for me is a little forced as a result, as if the author wants to make sure we get his point.

As Colm Toibin suggests in his Times review, Pip seems for a long time seems to be a victim of circumstance and an innocent in the ways of the world—far from the qualities of a major character. Indeed, Toibin calls her “a damaged innocent in need of rescue and redemption.” But even when her central role is more clear, she remains for me a passive character, more a character used by the author to reveal the more significant actions of the other characters. This is again evident when the author uses her to build a final scene that goes nowhere.

Toibin accurately sums up this novel when he writes: “it dramatizes the uneasy and damaging relationships between parents and their offspring in white America, the strains within friendship, and the ways time and familiarity and human failings work at corroding a marriage.” Of course, this is very abstract, perhaps because a critic needs to avoid spoilers, but it accurately reflects the family relationships that are the concern of Franzen in many of his works

The long section of Tom and Anabel’s corroding marriage particularly aggravated me. Especially Anabel’s whiney one-upmanship, her insistence that she is always right. And Tom’s acceptance of her, because he loves her, and his refusal to free himself from her for ten years. Of course, we finally come to understand her, as we finally realize who she actually is, but it is a long slog, barely justified by Franzen’s revelation.

Many of the reviewers comment on the coincidences that appear in this novel. And at the same time, they praise the forward-moving plot. Of course, that forward movement depends often on the coincidences, which bring these characters together at key points and at other times help them understand the motives of others. Such as Andreas and Tom meeting in Berlin. Such as Pip working for Andreas and then for Tom. Such as Andreas and Tom ending up in the same profession, that of revealing secrets. Such as, on the other hand, Pip’s ignorance of who her father and mother really are, the premise of the entire novel. And, finally, such as Pip bringing people together at the end, but with inconclusive, unconvincing results.

I observed that family relationships have long been a concern of the author. And in telling his other stories, he would move among the family members and tell each story from different viewpoints. But there was unity, because he was always within that family. Here, however, he goes beyond that basic family. First, we are not even sure who the basic family is comprised of. And, second, he makes Andreas, an outsider, part of that family. And both these factors require him to move about in time as well as in geography, in order to tell us this complicated story. And they also require him to hold back on key information. In other words, his structure is at the service of the story he wishes to tell.

I shall continue my interest in Franzen, but I hope he discovers a simpler way next time to tell his story of family relationships. (July, 2016)

The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King

This is the revised edition. The separate copyright dates reflect the original version of the first four volumes and then its edited version. When King, as a more mature writer, went back to edit the original versions, he basically tightened the writing and cleaned up the language (fewer adverbs), and then added or expanded key dramatic scenes. He then continued the series he had started twenty years earlier, apparently prompted by the plea of fans, his own vulnerability after a serious accident, and his guilt at never having finished the story of Roland and his unique quest.

I begin here with comments about the first four volumes in the series.

The Gunslinger (1982, 2003)

The first sentence is: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” And that sums up this volume. We are with the gunslinger, a man named Roland, as he crosses deserts, flees a town, climbs mountains, and follows a railway into darkness. For the latter portion he is accompanied by a boy, Jake, whose presence helps to humanize our hero and whose fate will later become significant.

From the beginning, we do not know who the man in black is, why the gunslinger is following him, what land we are in, or what past or future time zone we are in. But because this is Stephen King, this barren desert and the hazardous mountains are physically tangible; the intensity of the pursuing gunslinger is convincing, especially as we learn fragments of his past; and danger lurks in the shadows, the danger of the harsh environment and the implied threat of the man in black.

Only in the last chapter does this novel of adventure take on the characteristics of a quest novel, when it introduces a mystical element and a spiritual element. The focus of Roland’s quest is the Dark Tower, which contains the universe, or the secrets of the universe, or perhaps even God himself. King calls it “the nexus of Time, the nexus of Size.” Nothing is clear, however, about why Roland is seeking that tower. We do know, however, that the man in black being pursued is only an emissary; and that to reach the Tower, this man says, Roland must first kill the Ageless Stranger, whose name is “Legion.” His further message is that, on approaching the Tower, Roland will “do some unimaginable final battle.” One does not expect this to be a religious novel, despite the references to “let there be light,” but one can well detect the influence of such fantasy novels as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Nothing in the first four chapters, each focusing on a stage in Roland’s pursuit (and each, note, published as a short work in a fantasy publication), none of these adventures drew me into this series. But the final chapter did. Because I am intrigued by novels which explore the meaning of both the gift of life and the presence of evil, as well as by the persistence of a man in the face of overwhelming odds. And, like Roland, the reader wants to know why this shadowy man in black or his colleagues have earlier appeared in different guises and destroyed Roland’s family, and now appear to want to draw him toward that Dark Tower.

All in all, this work offers an unusual adventure in a strange land, but other than being an effective thriller, it did not break through and suggest a classic tale until that final chapter. And while the journey raised provocative issues, the destination, the Tower, did not truly intrigue me, not least because Roland himself does not really know what the Tower means, or what he is to do when he arrives at it. The interest began for me when the man in black figuratively snaps his fingers and mysterious events and dreamlike states raise provocative questions about how the universe is constructed, about its time and size, and about mankind’s role in that universe. (April, 2016)

 

The Drawing of the Three (1990, 2003)

This second volume immediately drew me into the magic world of Stephen King. It opens with Roland, the gunslinger, alone on a beach, where lobsterlike monsters appear and gnaw at his hand and his foot. Desperate, hungry, with infected fingers and toes, Roland encounters a door on the beach. He opens it, and is immediately on an airplane in flight and then inside the mind and body of one of its passengers, a drug-smuggler. Wow!

Three Tarot cards dealt by the man in black in Volume I determine the structure of this novel, and the title. They are represented by three doors that appear consecutively on the beach where Volume I ended. Each appears to be a door to the reality of the reader’s world, and each applies to a different person that Roland encounters. They are Eddie, a drug smuggler; Odetta, an crippled girl; and Jack Mort, who has injured her. And the three involve Roland in their own stories, a gangster melodrama, an early civil rights saga, and a psychopathic killing spree. Each adventure also involves Roland inserting himself into the body of these three individuals, and each is a fascinating thriller in itself.

Moreover, Roland’s ability to enter another person’s body and mind is foreshadowed here when two women, one good and one evil, exist in the same body during the civil rights section. Also, note that these three adventures that shift to another time frame offer an early instance of the time travel that King created with perfection in his later novel about JFK.

The only aspect that flummoxed me was the geography of the seashore. Based on the ocean’s location and the setting sun, I kept seeing these characters heading south, whereas King keeps saying they are heading north. He calls the ocean the Western Sea, and the south works when I picture them on the Pacific coast, but it does not work when I switch the setting to the Atlantic coast and try to head them north. Because the sun still sets over the ocean. Ah, well, either I am confused, or some explanation will come to me later.

To balance this, however, King pays a lot of attention to creating rich subsidiary characters: a stewardess, for example, a paramedic, or a drug store owner. These characters often have a credible past, as well as a function in the present, in the story at hand.

This volume appeared eight years after the first. One wonders why it took so long. And then King states that he began Volume I in the early 1970s, although it was published only in 1982. Obviously, he was working on other works at the same time, and he does grant this. He also labels himself “a young writer” when he wrote the first volume, which he explains is why he edited these early works and removed what he saw as an original pretentiousness. And he is also correct when he says he was not in full stride until he wrote this second volume.

For the first volume merely sets up Roland’s adventure. In this second volume, the adventures truly begin. Which makes this volume far more interesting. Not just because of the adventures themselves, but because of the imagination that goes into those adventures: the doorways to other times, the hero’s insertion into other minds and bodies, the lobsterlike monsters that crawl out of the sea.

So one looks forward to Volume III. For more adventures. For new and interesting characters. For still more imaginative developments. And for a better understanding of Roland and his mission on reaching the Dark Tower. (May, 2016)

 

The Waste Lands (1991, 2003)

This work begins more prosaically. A monster robotic bear is killed, yes, but then the trio of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah trek through the forest in search of the Dark Tower. While doing so, they discuss the anomalies of time travel, especially the fate of Jake, whether or not he did die in Manhattan, much less in the mountain chasm.

Whereupon, we switch back to the same Jake, younger and in school in Manhattan. He sees visions of the immediate future, and wants to escape them. In the book’s first brilliant section, Eddie draws a door in the ground in a Stonehenge type location the trio encounters in their travels, while Jake, back home, seeks to open a door in a deserted, haunted mansion. The connection between these two worlds, these two doors, and its climactic horror, is King at his finest. It also creates interesting questions: what actually is the relationship between Roland’s Mid-World, where most of this series is set, and our own world? And why is there such a connection? And, finally, what is the purpose of these characters moving back and forth between the two worlds?

King then moves into his narrative mode, where he is always strong, keeping the multiple time frames in the background. The adventures on the road to the Dark Tower moves from the almost deserted (except for old survivors) satellite city of River Crossing; to the crossing by foot of a fragile George Washington type bridge to Lud—a former metropolis, from where they are to catch a train to the Dark Tower—and then to the kidnapping of Jake and the pursuit to find him in the ruins of Lud.

To increase the narrative pace, King has split up his four people. The kidnapped Jake is taken to the villains’ hidden cave. Roland tracks him with the help of a bumbler, a small animal. And Eddie and Susannah seek out the train station where Blaine, a computerized evil train, can take them to the Dark Tower. King has forgotten the complexity of his time frames and gone, successfully, for a straight narrative drive. And this is further strengthened when he keeps each of his characters in jeopardy.

And yet, at the climax, as the characters come back together, King goes overboard in goosing the action. It becomes exaggerated, with Blaine, the computerized train, raining death down on the remaining citizens of Lud, and with Blaine also becoming a demanding, unreasonable, threatening character who is fascinated by riddles and speaks in all caps. And then, suddenly, after a magic ride through space, over craggy desolate land, and a further exchange of riddles, the action stops. The characters’ fate, and the continuation of this tale, now depends on an unknown riddle.

Except, we know the tale will continue, of course, for we are at the end of volume three of seven volumes. The potential of the fourth volume, however, is not that promising. In an Afterward, King says we will learn more of Roland’s past, of his youth. And the brief references to that past have certainly been puzzling. How significant to these adventures has been his family story and his gunslinger adventures? And how will this return to his past contribute to the forward movement of this series? We shall see. (May, 2016)

 

Wizard and Glass (1997, 2003)

We begin with 60 pages of talk and riddles that are short on action, and disappointing in the resolution of our heroes’ previous life or death situation. But we then turn to a story of Roland’s youth, and we are in a new and interesting novel. It is not Roland telling this story; it is King. And it is a love story. About Roland and Susan.

But it is also a western. An interesting western. With a convincing Western atmosphere. Roland is a teenager with two friends, Cuthbert and Alain. They are exiled by their fathers, for disciplinary reasons, to Mid-World. And there, in a town of fishermen and cattlemen, they discover a band of villains plotting a rebellion. Except, Roland also discovers Susan, and their love affair diverts his attention from the villains, which prompts increasing suspense. Still more is added when the villains are on to him. We know the end of the love affair, but not of the rebellion, and we read on to learn just how they interact.

Indeed, I apologize to King, for this tale truly stands on its own. I do wonder why he positioned it in volume four, but probably it is because it represents background, and is not part of his time travel story or the meaning of the Dark Tower. But it certainly reflects King’s strong narrative drive and his imaginative skills. Indeed, it offers the outstanding narrative of the series to date, at more than 500 pages of a 700-page book.

This narrative is a tale within a tale, and as Roland finishes telling the adventure of his youth to his audience of Eddie, Susannah, and Jake, King returns to his framing story and has some fun. He does a riff on The Wizard of Oz. And why not? They are in Kansas, after all. I also think it is appropriate. Because that book, the Oz book, is about two realities, the reality of the twister and the reality of Oz, where the twister deposits Dorothy. And this volume, too, is about two realities, the framing world of Kansas, where the mature Roland is telling is story, and the Mid-World of his youth, where as a teenager he fights his cowboy war and discovers his true love. And, of course, the entire series counterpoints the reader’s world, the America where Eddie, Susannah, and Jake come from, and how it interacts with the magic and weird world of the Dark Tower.

Far from a disappointment, this is the most exciting volume thus far. Because of its western action and because of its tale of young love. And while one anticipates more to come about the meaning behind the Dark Tower, there will still be still a sense of adventure. For the crystal ball, the witch Rhea, the monstrous Flagg, and the Path of the Beam are still out there. Indeed, toward the end, King suggests there will be a coming together of evil forces from his other fiction, starting with Flagg from The Stand. King fans can hardly wait. (May, 2016)

 

Here are my comments for the last three volumes in the series.

 

Wolves of the Calla (2003)

This work introduces a new group of people called the Calla and their enemy, the violent Wolves of the title. Each generation, these wolves steal away one youth in different sets of young twins, and then return the youths nearly brain dead. Now, representatives of these people ask our gunslingers, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake to protect them from these wolves.

As a new society, the Calla are not that interesting, nor are the early adventures of the gunslingers, even as they negotiate with the Calla people. Of possible interest is Mia, a confident young woman who appears inside Susannah, and whose presence neither Roland nor the reader initially understands. What is far more interesting are drugged mushrooms that carry some of the gunslingers, in a kind of hypnotic state called todash, back to New York City of the 20th century, where they have interesting adventures—first in a bookstore restaurant owned by a man named Tower and then in a vacant lot where grows a mysterious, transfiguring rose. Why are these todash trips happening, and what do they mean?

It gradually is apparent that this is another stand-alone novel, for this volume presents a detour to our friends’ quest to reach the Dark Tower. To go into more detail, as our friends leave the green castle of the previous volume, they are tracked by a half dozen Calla people led by an ex-priest named Callahan from Maine. These people belong to the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis, and, on recognizing our friends as gunslingers, ask for their help in defending their community against the Calla Wolves. Our friends agree to do so, and the bulk of the volume relates how they get to know the people, train them, establish a plan, and then fight the rapacious wolves. However, there are detours.

The first details the lengthy travels of this interesting ex-priest and how he reached Mid-World. The second is the revelation that Mia is carrying a baby inside Susannah—a baby which our friends are convinced is evil—an impregnation which occurred when Susannah initially distracted the devil’s minions, back in The Waste Lands, in order to help Jake enter Mid-World. And apparently Mia will protect this baby, whereas Susannah will not. But the larger detour is to New York, for there is a rose there on land owned by bookstore owner Tower; and because it has some unclear connection to our heroes reaching the Dark Tower, it has to be protected.

The finale is built around preparing for and fighting the Wolves of the title, as they seek to abscond with more twins. Both aspects are very well told, as Roland and his three friends first uncover the traitors in town who have enabled the wolves to triumph in the past. Then follows finding out who the wolves are, and the strategy to defeat them. And finally there is the battle itself, with successes on one level and losses on another. As if to show the reality of warfare includes the reality of sacrifice.

But King knows enough to leave us with cliffhangers, in order to draw us on to the next volume. Thus, Mia takes over Susannah’s body in order to have her baby, leaving the fate of Eddie’s Susannah up in the air. And there is also the bookseller Tower who has fled to Maine to escape the gangsters of Eddie’s New York. For Roland says Tower holds a key to their reaching the Dark Tower. And, finally, King introduces a bit of metafiction here, as his ex-priest Callahan appears in a previous novel by King set in Maine, and the ex-priest keeps insisting that he himself is not a fictional character.

I would also note here that after he finished the seven volumes in the Dark Tower series, King wrote an eighth novel, which he said takes place between volumes four and five. I can only conclude that it is another stand-alone volume, like volumes four and five; and that while it may include the same characters, it is, like volumes four and five, not truly a part of Roland’s quest to reach the Dark Tower and save the world. Or is it to save the universe? Rather. I suspect that that eighth volume owes more to the American Western, much as do, which King himself acknowledges, volumes four and five. (June, 2016)

 

Song of Susannah (2004)

This volume gets us back on track, on our heroes’ quest to reach the Dark Tower. But the route is circuitous. After the battle with the Wolves, our team is determined leave the Calla world and pass through another door so they can reach the Tower’s world. But there are still problems. Susannah is in that world with Mia and Mia is about to have her evil baby. And when our remaining three heroes, plus the priest, with local help, rediscover the door, they are separated as they are swept thorough, but not separated as planned, because Roland and Eddie are together in 1977 and Jake and the ex-priest together in 1999.

So we now face three adventures. First we follow Susannah and Mia in New York in 1999, as the time to give birth approaches. Then we have Roland and Eddie in Maine in 1977, tracking down the bookseller Tower who owns the vacant lot with the mysterious rose. There, they will encounter an immediate ambush set by gangsters hired by the man who wants to buy that same lot. And later we will follow Jake and the ex-priest into 1999.

Meanwhile, King begins to explain through these characters the world he has created here. In effect, it is multiple worlds, all existing at the same time, each with minor differences. One of these worlds is the core world, and it alone apparently leads to the Dark Tower. Moreover, events in that world, such as a death, can never be reversed, nor, once there, can one go back into the past of that world. This gives both the reader and the characters the need to focus on the true reality. Because only there can the Dark Tower be reached, and the universe saved from extinction.

And finally, between pages 200 and 300 of a 400-page book, King outdoes himself. He writes himself as a character into his own book. And sends his characters Roland and Eddie to interview himself. They want answers from this apparent god who has created them and their world—or their worlds. Roland wants King to continue the story so he can reach the Dark Tower to save human existence, while Eddie wants to know how to save his beloved Susannah.

But the confounding element is that they confront King in 1977, when he has drafted the first volume of the Dark Tower series but not yet published it. Indeed, he has bogged down, and is not sure how to move the story ahead. And so he is dumfounded when he is confronted by the very characters he has created. But, of course, Roland and Eddie know he later became unstuck, and did move the story ahead. So both time frames exist for the reader at the same time. But is it too convenient that, through hypnotism, Roland inspires/motivates King to move ahead with the story? And King himself gives his visitors a clue on how to rescue Susannah?

This visit has to be the imaginative high point of these seven volumes.

But this volume is mainly about Susannah and her baby. And so we continue as Jake and Callahan vault into 1999 New York, and are intent on saving Susannah. And just as they enter the Dixie Pig, a club where the bad guys are gathered, King backtracks us to Susannah herself, as she and Mia duel internally for control while Mia is also heading to the Dixie Pig, where she expects to be rewarded for giving birth. King, meanwhile, is foreshadowing the death of a number of characters. Now, I won’t put this past him but I think this is primarily to build suspense. Because he again leaves us with a cliffhanger of an ending, much like his riddle ending to volume three earlier.

And then King comes up with a fascinating and frustrating coda. For he presents a diary that he, King, has supposedly written over the years—between 1977, when the first move toward publishing the Dark Tower series comes to him (which coincides with the visit of Roland and Eddie, please note)—and his accident on June 19, 1999, a date which, of course, reflects the numbers 19 and 99, which play a major role in this volume. Thus, King is both having fun and making a point, that of re-enforcing the link between his own life and the fictional world of this novel. For he suggests that the visit to him by Roland and Eddie is what laid the seeds for the initiation and then the continuation of this series.

One senses this series finally approaching its climax, but there are few clues to what that climax will be. One expects the world will be saved, but no idea how. And one fears that death will be a byproduct of that success. (June, 2016)

 

The Dark Tower (2004)

This is the longest novel of the series, as if King wants to wrap up this tale but realizes his heroes still have a complicated journey to take before Roland reaches the Dark Tower. It will also be a tale populated by death—specific deaths attributed to ka, or fate, but also manipulated in part by King, who after all is the God of this universe.

This volume begins with angry beings who bring typical King horror to the forefront, a horror that has never appealed to me. The first moment of horror involves Jake and the ex-priest attempting to rescue Susannah, as she and Mia prepare for the birth. The second involves the baby itself, which can turn itself into a spider at will. This is followed by a long section underground, where the four gunslingers are rejoined, seemed trapped there, and then escape. It is a long section that is well done, but it seems to be a complicated way to get our travelers united and on their way to the Dark Tower.

But first King sets up another long, complicated, side-rip. Which, of course, is also interesting. The Tower is being compromised (broken) back at Thunderclap by the spellbound Breakers, and those Breakers must be stopped by being freed from where they are confined—which is also where the twins once had their brains hollowed out. This long section is complicated, moreover, by shifts to the baby/spider’s viewpoint, as well as to that of enemy officials at Fedic who are defending that fortress. An inevitable battle follows, as well as a confusing reappearance of certain characters, confusing at least unless you have a good memory of the earlier volumes. This is also where death intervenes, although more as a byproduct than as an inherent result.

Then King returns to his metafiction concept. After freeing the Breakers who were fomenting the collapse of the Tower, and so the universe, his characters must now save King himself. For they have learned he will be killed in 1999 near his home in Maine, and therefore will be unable to save the universe from destruction at the conclusion of his Dark Tower saga. The concept here of the writer of this saga saving himself from a death he didn’t endure but almost did—this is a second highlight of the series, and King builds to that real-life accident dramatically. But because the concept of King as a character has already been introduced, the implications are not as powerful here, and do not reach the previous imaginative heights—perhaps because writer King, in fact, was not killed. But King is pulling out all stops now, and, as another death intervenes, it is as if King wishes to emphasize the cost of saving the universe. Or is it simply that popular fiction demands such costs?

Meanwhile, author King has introduced Mrs. Tassenbaum, one of his interesting portraits of a minor character. She drives Roland from his home in Maine to New York, where he visits the lot with the rose, the rose now being preserved inside a giant building, 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza. There, he meets characters from past books. He then goes to the Dixie Pig with his team to find a long underground tunnel that will take them back to Mid-World, the world of the Dark Tower, a journey complicated by the presence of another monster. Once free, they trek across barren landscape, hoping to confront baby-spider Mordred on the way and finally reach the Dark Tower.

That final journey is an interesting one, for King knows how to make it so, but it is not exceptional. Our group is challenged by the landscape. One character departs and another arrives. They are also tricked by a vampire in disguise. Finally, Roland finds an innovative method to combat the arch villain, the Crimson King, who is housed in the Tower.

But at that point, King’s imagination truly bursts forth. First, he gives us a conventional ending at the Tower. Which is inconclusive. Then he offers the sidebar of a happy ending. Finally, he addresses the reader, as he has done throughout the series, this time with a challenge. Read on, if you must, he dares the reader, but I am not sure you will like what you find. And, indeed, he comes up with a dilly of an ending, his own version, one might say, of A Handful of Dust. But its power is a fitting climax to our long trek through these seven volumes.

As for the details of Roland’s final climb of the Tower in King’s second ending, I found it highly evocative, as he encounters details from his long journey. As a summing up of both his life and the series, I found it quite moving. But I was also confused at the very end, for King writes that Roland’s awareness of an heirloom horn is meant to suggest that he may well find resolution and redemption. I did not sense this at all in my initial reading. Yes, the horn blows at the end of the conventional ending, and Roland is aware of it in the second ending, but I still do not grasp the significance King attributes to it. Presumably it requires one to recall its significance from the first volume, which I am unable to do without returning to that volume. Which, I think, is beyond what any author should require.

 

How do I sum up this series? It is a major effort by a popular writer to write something better than a popular story, but using popular fiction techniques. It is also an attempt to write a literary work of the imagination. Its references to western fiction, to the Kansas of Oz, to Alice in Wonderland, much less to multiple worlds, support this. Indeed, there are many references throughout the series to historical events and literary works, as if to underline King’s attempt here to write serious fiction. In fact, his inspiration, he says, was Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which certainly captures this volume’s confrontation with a deceitful man and then a long trek across a desert land to the Dark Tower—and where at the end, note, “the slug-horn to my lips I set, and blew.”

Whether this series will ever be recognized as literature is doubtful. There is too much complicated coincidence. But it is the closest we have to Harry Potter. Well, an adult version of Harry Potter, because of its mild sexual references. There is also too much fate here for a true comparison to The Fellowship of the Ring. That is, the characters are too destined for their fates rather than responsible for it themselves, and this is also too often foreshadowed by the author.

It is also interesting that King in his Note states that “I wasn’t exactly crazy about the ending, if you want to know the truth, but it’s the right ending The only ending, in fact. You have to remember that I don’t make these things up, not exactly; I only write down what I see.”

Is this a cop-out? A further blending of reality and fiction? Or is King admitting that he couldn’t come up with anything better? One critic has said that King has a problem with endings. But, of course, many authors also do. I’m sure the double ending appealed to him. And I give him credit for it. I only wish I understood the horn. Is that a third ending?

As for King inserting himself into his own book, he makes an interesting case in his Note. Which is that when he realized, consciously and unconsciously, that much of his fiction reverberates back to Roland’s adventures, he saw this series “as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible…as a way of showing how life influences art (and vice-versa).” This is as good a rationale as any, but I can easily imagine the smile on King’s face as he inserted himself into his tale.

I sense that King was trying to break new ground here, new fictional ground, new American fictional ground. With his quest theme. With his multiple worlds. With writing himself in as a character. With multiple characters within one character. With a black character who is never presented as such after her initial introduction—and with a handicap that is taken for granted. And, finally, with a mix of monsters, robots, and time travel amid natural settings, Western settings, and yet with also a clear Manhattan presence and a Maine presence.

To conclude on a positive note, one should not overlook the fact that love plays a prominent role in this series. Both romantic love and love among friends. First, among the four main characters, but also for the allies they encounter, some of whom sacrifice for them as well as for their own communities. Nor should the reader overlook the lead characters’ sound emotional responses to the events they face and to their interaction with each other in response to those events. Indeed, he even suggests moments of sympathy, if only briefly, for his monsters. Making them almost human, too. Throughout this series, King reveals his heart, whether dealing with heroes or villains, as well as his far-ranging imagination. He is an author we should treasure. His heart reveals itself in nearly every character, and his imagination finds the unusually interesting in the commonplace. (July, 2016)

 

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

This 2005 novel is built around a highly original idea. But the author leads us to that idea too slowly to suit me. So slowly, in fact, that I was unsure if I wanted to continue reading beyond the first 50 or so pages.

But I did. I had hesitated because the work begins with an adult, Kathy H, addressing the reader about her days at a special school, Hailsham, where nothing dramatic happens, simply ordinary school chatter and childish intrigue; where her fellow classmates have hidden characteristics and her teachers have hidden purposes, depriving each of any intriguing depth; and where a certain mystery about the children’s future hangs in the air. The students are called special, but they are not sure initially why they are at this school, why they are special, or what their destiny may be.

And that uncertainty hangs over them for most of the novel, especially what will become of them when they leave the school. All this begins with, as James Woods says, “the squabbles and jockeying and jealousies of ordinary schoolchildren.” Indeed, Woods acknowledges that “Kathy’s pale narration represents a calculated risk on Ishiguro’s part.” Gradually, matters become clearer, however, as these students graduate to the Cottages. And, oh, so slowly, we learn that they will become carers and donors, although even then it is not yet clear what those two categories mean. Overall, this is a narrative characterized by understatement, an approach that removes its inherent drama, reminding this reader of the understatement between the butler and housekeeper in the movie, The Remains of the Day.

Moreover, this understatement is supplemented by a back-and-forth narrative technique in which Kathy presents a statement or the outcome of a scene and then tells the reader she has to go back in order that he understand the significance of that statement or that scene. After a while, this approach grows too calculated, and too repetitive, for its intended purpose, which is to create periodic moments of drama. It is also, of course, a byproduct of Kathy’s uncertainty a propos her friends’ motives and her own future.

The novel is built around Kathy’s relationship with two friends, Ruth and Tommy. The two girls clearly like Tommy when they meet at their school, Hailsham, and the reader suspects an emotional triangle will soon develop. And it does, but not as the reader anticipates. For one girl wins, and then sacrifices, and then the other girl wins, and sacrifices. Which is intended to be moving. But the understated, undramatic approach to their sacrifices did stand in the way of any emotional response from this reader.

Also contributing to the lack of drama is that Kathy is such an understanding person. She refuses to get mad at anyone, always seeking to understand why other people, particularly Ruth and Tommy, act in the way they do. Thus, at the heart of the novel, there is a lack of dramatic tension within their three-sided relationship.

It is unclear at the start, as I said, and deliberately so, what being a donor means and what being a carer means. But even as it becomes more clear, what is not clear is how one moves from being a carer to a donor, only that some remain longer as carers before they become donors. And yet, this progression, which plays a significant role in the novel, remains unexplained.

Woods takes a different approach than I do to this work. He writes: “Never Let Me Go is a fantasy so mundanely told, so excruciatingly ordinary in transit, its fantastic elements so smothered in the loam of the banal and so deliberately grounded, that the effect is not just of fantasy made credible or lifelike, but of the real invading fantasy, bursting into its eccentricity and claiming it as normal.” He calls this novel an allegory. And so, he says, the programmed futility of these children’s lives is a metaphor for the programmed futility of our natural life in today’s world. He says Ishiguro uses the tools of fantasy to create this allegory. And that “the very dullness of these children, their lack of rebelliousness, even incuriousness, is what grounds the book’s fantasy.” Thus, the weakness that I see is, for him, the novel’s strength.

Which, of course, I do not accept, not in literary terms. It may work to convey an allegorical message, but my criteria in judging a novel calls for me getting inside the characters, in being able to understand or relate to them. Whereas Ishiguro allows me inside their questioning but not inside their hopes or dreams of the future. Because they do not have a future. Their lives are circumscribed, whether by the novel’s reality or by his allegory. Of course, Woods might argue that Ishiguro’s “real interest is not in what we discover but in what his characters discover, and how it will affect them. He wants us to inhabit their ignorance, not ours.”

On a more realistic level, Joseph O’Neill writes in The Atlantic that
the children’s “hesitant progression into knowledge of their plight is an extreme and heart-breaking version of the exodus of all children from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent adult world conspires to place them.” Extreme, yes, I would agree, but heart-breaking, no.

The title refers to a song that Kathy likes and sings aloud. She innocently interprets these words in a love song to be about a woman, like her, who cannot have a baby and then has one, and never wants to let it go. Whereas a school matron sees her and weeps, thinking, we later learn, that the scene is symbolic of the innocent world this schoolgirl is clinging to as opposed to the inevitable scientific world that is coming. It is also representative of the multi-level meanings in this volume of two separate worlds, and in which one world unknowingly serves the other.

Although Ishiguro has received critical acclaim for this and other works, and is highly respected in his adoptive Britain, this novel alone would not prompt me to read more of his work. Nevertheless, I will, because of that reputation and because I did very much enjoy Orphans. Besides, you cannot evaluate a novelist, or his appeal to you, based on one novel. And, certainly, the ambition of this novel, as well as of Orphans, promises additional rewarding worlds to come from Ishiguro’s pen. (April, 2016)

The Plover, by Brian Doyle

 

This 2014 work is quite a novel, quite an unusual novel. Indeed, a tour de force. It breaks so many rules, in fact, as it creates worlds of its own. It offers both a real world and an imaginary world, each created with poetry, sensitivity, and humor. But most significant are the many rules of fiction it breaks—with its endless, rhythmic sentences, its magic realism of talking birds, and its direct and indirect addressing of the reader.

This is the story of a man, Declan O’Donnell, who journeys around the vast Pacific in his small fishing boat, the Plover. He revels in his solitude, but slowly takes on passengers along the way, passengers who expand his and our awareness of the expanse and depths of both the Pacific and the human experience. But this book requires patience. It is not a book for everyone. For a long while, I wondered where it was going, much less where the boat and Declan, its captain, were going. Finally, I realized that there were no rules. That I was to experience here the journey within as much as the novel without. That this was not just about reality, this was also an inner voyage, a journey into the meaning of human nature and the implications of our natural environment.

This Pacific voyage is so real, however, that one wonders how Doyle has made it come alive with such detail. Yes, the credits listed in his acknowledgements suggest tremendous research, which is often the key to richly conceived novels such as this. But one also speculates that it is time he has spent at sea himself that has enabled Doyle to capture this experience so brilliantly.

And yet the strength of this novel is not in that reality, but in the magic, meaning the author’s imagination. In the miracle of an impaired, dumb child, for example, who can communicate with birds, one of whom suddenly enables her to speak. And in other birds that give comfort and anticipate danger. There is even literary magic in the long, complex, yet clear sentences that stretch the core of a thought or of a situation to its verbal limits.

Underlying the magic and the beauty, however, is a story, for Doyle understands that he needs a story in order to draw the reader through what are at times ephemeral pages. And so the hero Declan picks up various passengers, each with a story to tell and each contributing to the journey. There is an old friend Piko, and his daughter Pipa who has been crippled by an accident and cannot talk; Tauromauri, a woman so huge she is first taken to be a man; Tungaru, a minister for fisheries, etc., who dreams of a Utopian nation of Pacific islands; and Danilo, a refugee with a marvelous singing voice. And finally, for suspense, there is the mysterious Tanets, a ship in pursuit of the Plover. Why is its captain, Enrique, so intent on sinking the Plover and its passengers? It will become clear when he becomes the final passenger.

There is additional suspense in a typhoon, a kidnapping and rescue, a hijacking, and a sea battle, but it is balanced by Declan’s introspection as he seeks to escape society, and society keeps confronting him with new passengers, new adventures, and new implications. And hovering in Declan’s mind are the writings of Edmund Burke, the Irish philosopher whose thinking enriches the context of Declan’s search for meaning across a vast and empty Pacific Ocean.

One senses that Doyle declines to be limited by the rules of fiction. Perhaps this follows his interest in the spiritual aspects of life. Thus, just as that level of perception breaks the bounds of reality, so does a similar perspective seek to break theough the limits of the literary world. I do wonder how much this limits his exposure inside the literary world, but one suspects his primary concern is exploring the limits of both literature and the human experience—as, indeed, Declan is exploring his own limits across a Pacific also limitless.

This novel offers the continuation of Declan’s life after he fades into the Pacific on the final pages of Mink River. One wonders if Doyle will continue Declan’s story, and extend these books into a trilogy. He does open the door to a third volume, when Declan discovers a potential love on the final pages here. Such a continuation may depend, however on Doyle’s interest in exploring further a Declan who has changed from a troubled hero in the first volume to a solitary, searching hero in the second. Do still new adventures await him, in which he will further pursue the fulfillment he seems denied? It would appear that love might well offer a new, and perhaps spiritual, horizon. (April, 2016)

Note: Because of a previous contact, I sent the author my review; and he wrote this in his response: “I am interested in writing novels that are experiences in and of themselves. I want the language to be a world; I want the reader to be lured in and mesmerized; I want them to hear and see and smell what the beings in the book do; I want you to be startled when you find a blank page at the end; I want you to come with me into imagination and possibility and the probability of the nominally impossible; I want you to question what you think you know; I want to soar and sail and dive and delve; I want to push the form as far as I can, and I have only one rule: be clear. As long as the reader doesn’t get clogged and slowed, everything is possible.”