By Michael O'Brien
Catholic-ometer: 3 of 5
Enjoyability: 0.5 of 5
You may have noticed I haven't put up that many reviews recently, and there are a couple reasons for that, but the biggest one is that I've been slowly plodding through one of the most vapid, boring, meandering trainwrecks of a book that I've ever read in my life. So much so, in fact, that at first, I wanted to label this review "What is -wrong- with you people?" However, rather than throw a fit over this vast tome, I thought I'd address the problems I had with it, and they are many; too many to fit into a normal-sized review. Still, I feel that each one deserves to be addressed, because they recurr so often throughout the book, and last for so long, that I've suffered for quite some time under each, so I need to get them off my chest. This is why I decided to do this review in a five-part awfulganza. Without further ado; "The Father's Tale."
Now, I have a lot of criticisms to level against this book's characters and plot, but until you understand some of what they're about, the criticisms just won't stick, so that's what step number 1 is; to understand what's wrong with the plot and the pacing.
Stage 1; Slow Start
I believe some books have a right to start out slow, but this book is slow, even by their standards. Alex Graham lives in his hometown of Halcyon, has some friends, who he trades life stories with, and for a couple hundred pages, there's absolutely no word of his son or any clue that there might actually be a main plot to this book. I'm sorry, but that's simply unacceptable. At worst, a story should launch into the main plot by the end of the first fifty or so pages, and be well underway by page 60. This book seems to assume that you have literally nothing to do with your time except watch a reclusive bookseller dither around his hometown in the backwoods of Canada, talking to uninteresting characters and engaging in spontaneous, stuffy, overly-worded retrospectives.
There's a subplot about a mentally-handicapped woman who's also apparently a mystic of sorts, a subplot about two kids who almost drown in a river, and how Alex saves them and meets their mother and grandfather, and a subplot about how his friend, Father Toby, and his enemy Charles are both trying to get him to do what they want him to, but none of these subplots have anything to do with the main plot, and none of them contribute anything to it. Furthermore, none of them really go anywhere, or lead to anything interesting happening, which is an even worse shame. You'll find this to be a common thread throughout the book.
Finally, Alex hears cryptic words from his son that make him think his son Andrew may have become a cultist or something, but his next message from his son is cut short. He's a very poor man, so he decides to put his house up as collateral in exchange for a bank loan and goes to where his son was last reported to be, which leads him on a chase across Europe and Russia, and leads us into the next section of the story.
Stage 2; Where in the World is Andrew Graham?
I suppose you might think that a chase by plane across Europe and Russia would be exciting. It's not, for several reasons. First, because Alex always seems to arrive just a little too late to really catch up to the cultists who seem to have kidnapped his son. Second, we have no idea whether these cultists really have kidnapped his son, so any possibility of a tense atmosphere is very effectively killed. Third, even in the rare cases where he does seem to be close to his alleged enemies, it's never completely clear just what he's supposed to do about it.
He tries to talk to them. They blow him off. He tries to talk to them again. They blow him off a second time. He tries to send them a message. They confiscate the message and blow him off a third time. He tries to send a veiled telephone message. They catch on immediately and laugh in his face. In short, he very expertly fails at everything he tries (an element I'll expand on when I discuss the characters,) and the worst part is that any reasonably-clever character would have noticed that these people didn't want to talk to him from the start, and devised a sort of trap for them.
As things are, this whole section of the book is just (1.) the cultists fly to a new city, (2.) Alex follows them, (3.) Alex makes a buffoon of himself, learning nothing from the experience, (4.) the cultists get away, (5.) repeat steps 1-4 several times. In short, it's like a really boring game of "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego," because at least in that game, you know you're chasing a criminal, and have the authority you need to apprehend and imprison said criminal; so there's always the hope that something might actually result from the trip. Alex lacks either of these assurances, so his trip is nowhere near as exciting, because for all we know, there's nothing at stake.
That's not enough, though. Oh, no. We have to slow this section down even more by including a dozen irrelivent sub-plots abou people we've never met before, and who will have no impact on this story from this point on. Alex talks to a caretaker of an old church for pages and pages. He's never seen again. Alex spends several pages saving a prostitute. She makes no further appearances in his life. Alex spends several pages bringing an insane bum to a hospital. Good for Alex, but not good for us, because he's never seen again, making the whole sub-plot completely pointless. Alex spends several pages talking to a beautiful woman on the train before accidentally setting himself on fire (I'm not kidding; that's how incompetent he is.) Well, I hope he got a lot out of that, because pretty soon, she exits the train, and the book might as well have just said "See? Don't you love it when irrelivent characters like her deliberately waste your time?"
As slowly as this story has been moving up to now, however, it has at least been somewhat relevant to the whole "find the son" thing. Soon, Alex's train gets stopped by terrorists (a fitting metaphor,) and he finds himself stranded in Siberia, with no idea what happened to his son, which brings us to section number 3 of the story.
Stage 3; The Story Grinds to a Halt
Here we come to one of the worst parts of the story. You know those totally-irrelivent side-stories that we hated from part two? Never wanted to see that kind of thing again, right? Well, boy are you out of luck, my friend, because that's all this next section consists of. Now that Alex is lost in Siberia with absolutely no hope of finding his son (read; getting back to the plot,) he's free to shamble into one irrelivent side-character after another. First, he runs into some priests living in a tiny little house in the middle of nowhere. Each gobbles up over ten pages with irrelivent backstory we don't need. Then after getting mugged, robbed and bludgeoned with a pipe, he ends up lodging with a Russian doctor in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.
In this new village, we have (guess what?) more irrelivent characters, with more long, unrelated backstories to trudge through. Joy. The doctor herself, of course, is one. Then there's her two boys and their missing father Yevgeny, who despite being dead, manages to gobble up pages and pages of this book with his life story. Then there's Aglaya, who only fits into this story because she's pushy and annoying, and demands her story be heard. A long story that Alex tells to the Russian kids in that little town is even included, just in case you needed more of a reason to pull your hair out.
Oh, and did I mention that Alex stays here for months? No joke. He's so busy recuperating from his pipe-bludgeoning, that he has time to not only teach the kids some english and tell them stories, but build an igloo with them. That igloo gets smashed by horsemen, though, so he builds them another, and they stand guard over it. He also has the chance to convince the doctor's son that no matter what, he should never, ever fight over anything, but I'll cover this in part 3. He even tries to fall in love with the doctor. Sure, why not? It's not like you've got a missing son to worry about.
Soon, he wanders off into the hills and stumbles across some fences with associated lights and video cameras. Some guards with guns grab him, stuff a bag over his head and kidnap him, which leads us into stage 4.
Stage 4; The Hyperactive Jump-Start that Failed
After being abducted by security guards, Alex is taken to a Russian prison and interrogated in an irritating way. The guards repeatedly refer to him as an intelligence agent named "Bell," and don't listen to a word he says. This interrogation process is covered in excruciating detail. Then, he's thrown in a cell, interrogated some more, tortured in -enormous- detail again, and put on a train, where he watches one of his guards get shot in front of him. This bugs him a lot, even though he's totally insane by now. He's kidnapped again and taken to China, where we repeat the same interrogation subplot as with the Russians, except thankfully in summary form, and with no torture. It ends in him being handed over to some Americans who ship him out to Hawaii, and then guess what? More interrogations! Hooray!
I get the feeling that the author realized just how boring his book was getting, so he tried to jump start it. I can't fault him for trying, but the reason this jump-start fails is that the boredom isn't the only problem this book has. Each stage of the story is repetitive and full of expounding characters telling their own (and sometimes someone else's) life stories. None of this changes during this stage. Even if it did, however, it wouldn't matter, because all of this is totally irrelivent to the main son-finding storyline, and Alex becomes progressively less coherent as this section of the story proceeds, making his musings even more painful to read than usual.
Eventually, he's returned to Canada, though, where we -finally- come to the last part of the story.
Stage 5; The Ending, and Why it Was Fail
At last, Alex is home. It turns out his home didn't get taken by the bank after all, so... good? I guess? Andrew is back too... So the book lost track of the main plot for so long, it sort of... resolved itself while we weren't watching. Major copout, but whatever. It's almost over. Oh, and the bad guys got away. Yay?
There's some nonsense about how we can't solve all these problems on our own given as an "explanation" for why the author decided to let the cultists get off scott free, but... the fact is, Alex wasn't on his own. In fact, at one point in the story, while he's being tortured, he has a vision of Jesus suffering with him, and he's very religious throughout the entire book. What else is he missing that he still can't get the bad guys? Never explained.
Sorry, this book has me rambling a little. Alex's influence must be rubbing off on me, so I'd better take a break before I get into part 2; problems with the characters.
No comments:
Post a Comment