Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (19 page)

Last Harbor

by George Foy

Bantam Spectra, 357 pages, paperback, 2002 reissue of a book originally published in 2001

Somewhere in New England there's a decaying harbour, and living there on a decaying sloop is the equally decaying Slocum, once the technical brains behind X-Corp Multimedia but now a recluse nursing himself through the miseries of his shattered marriage and rejection by his daughter. He wants nothing to do with the world, and the world is adamant that it wants nothing to do with him.

That future world is both recognizable and unrecognizable to us. The milieux within which Slocum moves are little different from their counterparts today; the poor and relatively poor have seen little change in their lives except possibly for the worse. The elite rich, by contrast, have grown inexorably richer, and the technological future is really theirs alone. The sad paradox is that they seem to be doing very little with it except find new ways of entertaining themselves, of filling up the hours with pleasurable idleness, of keeping their lives empty. The vitality of the human race seems to be almost exclusively the province of the poor and dispossessed.

The business of X-Corp Multimedia is interactive virtual-reality entertainment – the Flash. In effect, X-Corp Multimedia are the new drug lords, and they have come to rule the world; because the Flash is as mind-destroyingly addictive as any pharmaceutical yet of course perfectly legal.

One night, as Slocum contemplates either death or his dreams of sailing off to find freedom in the as yet untrammelled parts of the world that must surely exist – the two subjects of his contemplation are really one and the same – there moors in the harbour an almost impossibly huge luxury ocean liner. Aboard it, aside from the crew and security goons, there is only one person: an enigmatic and secretive young woman, Melisande, a recluse like himself by whom Slocum is at first idly attracted, then obsessed. As his obsession unfolds, it draws him back into the land of the living while at the same time progressively revealing the hideous truth not only of Melisande's existence but also of the way the world is run.

The Last Harbor
is a singularly beautifully written book, one that transcends all genre boundaries; it is a serious and major piece of fiction. At the same time it is also a crusader
for
fiction, for the written and printed word, encroached upon as it increasingly is by other media forms. Consider this:

In that same cool blue light he looked at the book and saw what she [Slocum's estranged daughter] would see – an incomprehensible attempt to approximate, in black-and-white and painful script, a story that four years ago she could have watched in color and sound so perfect that she might as well have been living it. Worst of all, the gap between what he had put into it as both creation and gift, and what she saw it as, would substantify, more than her mother's words ever could, how the separation between them had grown. If he could not understand how she felt about the stories that had once shaped her life, what could he know of who she was now, or how she felt? And what right did he have to insist that he know the forces she reacted to daily?

In other words, the printed book grants the reader freedom – a freedom that is all too readily denied to the population of
The Last Harbor
's VR-dominated world. It is the same freedom that Slocum evisages when he fantasizes about sailing his sloop away to somewhere new, somewhere better, somewhere so bright and shining that it could only exist in those dreams of his – the freedom of exercising one's
own
imagination rather than simply participating vicariously in the enactment of someone else's imagination.

Foy is a master of atmospherics, and mood. This is one of those books where, once immersed, one has to make an effort to jolt oneself back into the everyday world, to recognize it as the true reality and the book's as a fictional one. Although there is in fact quite a lot of physical action in
The Last Harbor
, the real story is one of mental action – and it's an absolutely engrossing one.

Foy's characterization is spot-on as well. He is an expert in that rare art of perceiving other human beings. Here is just one of the many little character vignettes that appear all through the novel:

[Vera's] gaze seemed the product of great internal pressure. Slocum remembered Vera from X-Corp Christmas parties ... She had always seemed poised and charming and without foundation; one of those people who talked a great deal and the more they talked the less, you realized, they were actually able to do.

Or this, spoken by one of the characters:

All dat man's got is, leaving his wife.
Madre de diosh
, what's he gonna have left if he really does it?

And then there is the somewhat longer description of Melisande when Slocum first meets her:

She had thin shoulders covered by a scarlet dressing gown that fell to the floor in columns so that for a microsecond he had the impression the ship had been designed to suit her. Or maybe it was the other way around and, because the whole ship was designed like that, she had dressed to match.

A white silk scarf was wrapped around her neck, which seemed to bend as it rose to support the oval of her face. Her nose was very straight until the end, where it turned up. Her chin and cheekbones were not weak but they did not quite work together – though they looked as if they might, in a plane projected forward from her face, closer to where she was going. Her hair was caught up in back and draped around her features in frondlike whirls and curves. Thin, a little crooked in how she held herself against the door; those were all part of his collection of first impressions of Melisande Yonge. But the ones that hit him hardest, and stayed with him longest, were: She was pale, so pale her skin looked like rice paper lit from within; and the combination of that pallor and her sudden appearance out of nowhere and the particular presence of her convinced him, for another microsecond, that he knew her; more specifically, that he had invented her... .

The Last Harbor
is in its way a very quiet book, but it is also a very powerful one. And a wonderful one.

—Infinity Plus

Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

Tor, 398 pages, hardback, 2002; foreword by Terri Windling

This superb novel is one of the Terri Windling-edited
Fairy Tale
series in which writers recast traditional tales. In this instance, Frost combines
Bluebeard
and
Fitcher's Birds
to produce a fantasy that's very much more entrancing than either.

It's 1843, and charismatic preacher Elias Fitcher claims the world is about to end; all except those who come to dwell in his utopian community in the Finger Lakes region of New York State will be forever damned by a vengeful Lord. Among the families suckered by this nonsense are the Charters: mom, dad and their three lovely daughters, Vernelia, Amy and Kate. Fitcher's eye first falls on the eldest sister, and she becomes his bride ... but soon disappears. Then it's the turn of Amy, and finally, of course, Kate is "favored." Kate, who's spunky and intelligent, succeeds in outwitting and defeating the vile sexual predator Fitcher where the over-sensible Vernelia and the flighty Amy have failed.

This is exactly as you'd expect from a fairy tale. What you wouldn't have expected, though, is that Frost succeeds in turning his fable into a very full fantasy, in two principal respects. One of these is the long denouement, about which I ought not to say too much (for fear of spoiling) except that Fitcher proves to be very much more than the mere charlatanistic mortal he seems. And the other is Frost's creation of the bizarre, near-macabre supposedly utopian society itself. Jekyll's Glen seems, as you read, to be simply a rather strange community – well, what else might one expect from nineteenth-century religious nuts? Very subtly Frost reveals its further strangenesses, so that it's only after some considerable amount of acceptance of the plausible reality of Jekyll's Glen that you suddenly bring yourself up short at the realization that things are actually
very
odd. It's then that you look back and discover quite how much you've taken at face value that you shouldn't have.

Frost's artistry is exemplary, and his tale-telling likewise. This is a dark and broody novel that'll hold you from beginning to end.

—Crescent Blues

Alone

by Lisa Gardner

Bantam, 336 pages, hardback, 2005

Lisa Gardner at the top of her form has become one of the best of our current genre-thriller writers, and even when she achieves less than that she's still head and shoulders above many of her competitors. In
Alone
she doesn't attain the heights of
The Survivors Club
or even
The Killing Hour
(both discussed below), but she has nonetheless written a thriller of some considerable interest in that it's a sort of crossover between the genre thriller and the noir novel, coming complete with a
femme fatale
figure.

This
femme fatale
is beautiful, sexy Catherine Rose Gagnon. A couple of decades ago, as an adolescent, she was imprisoned underground and repeatedly raped by the psychopathic Richard Umbrio; that she survived is the reason Umbrio was finally caught and put behind bars. More recently she has married the playboy Jimmy Gagnon, son of a prominent judge, and borne him their son Nathan. But Jimmy is a serial adulterer and drunkard, and abuses her.

One night the Boston SWAT team is called to the Gagnon home; yet again the neighbors have reported the sounds of violence – gunshots, even. Massachusetts State Trooper Bobby Dodge is deployed across the street as a sniper, should the need for one arise. And arise it does: he sees Jimmy Gagnon apparently about to shoot Catherine, and fires first. But Jimmy's father, Judge Gagnon, does not take his son's death easily, and commences to use his very considerable power to hound Bobby on murder charges. And the judge also persecutes Catherine, trying obsessively to seize custody of Nathan from her.

Meanwhile, Umbrio has been unexpectedly released from prison, and has begun a murder rampage. Yet these are not random killings: he has been hired to follow someone else's agenda. His ultimate target is the girl who escaped from his clutches 25 years ago, Catherine Gagnon.

Both Bobby and Catherine are in their different ways alone against the world, and so naturally they gravitate toward each other. The only way they can hope to get themselves out of the legal quagmire the judge has cast them into is to delve into the complex of motivations driving the man's increasingly strident attempts to ruin their lives. For Bobby this means walking an emotional tightrope so far as his feelings for Catherine are concerned: on the one hand he is engaged in a torrid affair with her, and adores her; on the other he suspects her of merely using him as her puppet, and perhaps even of engineering the death of her husband.

A welter of fine supporting characters help this story bubble along merrily. I particularly enjoyed Elizabeth Lane, the psychotherapist to whom Bobby is referred for counselling after the shooting; she too has her reasons for feeling alone. Susan, the girlfriend whom Bobby dumps in his infatuation for
femme fatale
Catherine, is likewise well drawn, as are Bobby's one-time lover and fellow cop D.D. and even the murderous Umbrio. What marks
Alone
as a lesser Gardner work is that there are a few plot twists so improbable that the necessary suspension of disbelief becomes hard to maintain; one of these in particular is completely gratuitous (the twist is irrelevant to the plot), artificial (it's only a twist because the author hasn't been playing fair with the reader), and consequently irritating.

But, as noted at the outset, even lesser Gardner is better than much other genre-thriller fare, so
Alone
can certainly be recommended as a thoroughly enjoyable means of whiling away a few winter's evenings.

—Crescent Blues

The Killing Hour

by Lisa Gardner

Bantam, 324 pages, hardback, 2003

There's a serial killer at work, but a serial killer with a difference!

Yes, I know: you've heard that opening line before. But please bear with me. This one has an
m.o.
whereby he abducts two young women at once; one he kills immediately, but then he doctors the corpse so that (for anyone who can first realize his intentions and then interpret his cryptic clues) it acts as a pointer to the location where he has dumped the second abductee – alive, but in fiercely hostile territory and with an inadequacy of survival essentials. The woman who is "first victim" is thus the lucky one; so far all but one of his "second victims" have endured torturous deaths.

The killer's stamping ground has hitherto been Georgia, but Georgia agent Mac McCormack has had an anonymous tip that brings him to FBI Headquarters at Quantico. Sure enough, the next "first victim" is dumped in right inside the Quantico grounds, where it is discovered by trainee agent Kimberly Quincy. Assisted by Kimberly's ex-FBI father and his lover, now running an investigations agency together, Mac and Kimberly have to do battle with inordinate amounts of FBI red tape and pecking-order politics as they try to identify the whereabouts of the "second victim" in time to save her life. What they discover is that this time the Eco-Killer – so-dubbed by the press because his motives appear to include a twisted attempt to draw public attention to endangered wilderness areas – has devised a riddle far more devious and far more ambitious in its scope than any he has set before ...

So far so good – and the fact that this tale is told in Gardner's characteristically smooth and readable style helps proceedings along. With its notion of murdered bodies being adulterated to offer elaborate clues,
The Killing Hour
is almost reminiscent of those fascinating Golden Age detective novels by the likes of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr where the murderer is engaging in a complicated intellectual game with the detective; in such terms, Gardner's novel is every bit as engrossing as those precursors.

But don't get the idea you're in for an old-fashioned entertainment of the Queen or Carr type. This is very much a 21st-century detection, with an engagingly feisty heroine to match. (That she should be attracted to McCormack, who seems to have more hands than brains when women are around, grates.) And the sufferings of the victims are not intellectualized into irrelevance, as would be the case in the traditional entertainment.

Unfortunately, that pinpoints the eventual problem with
The Killing Hour
. Its literary precursors did not strive for realism – indeed, deliberately shunned it so the focus would be on the puzzle, on the game, with the plot being all the more delightful for its stark implausibility. Gardner's plotting in the later stages of this novel proves to be every bit as implausible; but because the telling relies on realism – her intent is to thrill, not just to puzzle – her denouement thereby comes as a profound letdown. A shame, because there has been so much before those final fifty pages that enthralled.

An oddity. Internal evidence would suggest that Gardner's intention was to call this novel
Heat Kills
. Instead it bears the rather hackneyed, uninspiring title
The Killing Hour
. One wonders what went on there.

—Crescent Blues