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XXXIX: John Connolly, The White Road
Fourth of the Charlie Parler novels, in which the private detective heads south to investigate the case of a black man who may have been wrongly accused of a murder. Meanwhile one of the villains from the previous books may be about to be released on bail - funded by the KKK - and would no doubt seek revenge.
I suspect Connolly's structure is too baroque for it's own good; ostensibly Parker is the first person narrator, but we also get to points where he is not present, and where he could have no knowledge of what happened. Viewpoints don't have to be fixed, of course, but it seems more to be about keeping the plates spinning than aesthetics. It is gripping, and is still suggesting there is more to the world than the natural. Angel and Louis, Connoly's favoured deux ex machina, are little more than cameos. I have the next two in the series (bought in Whitstable), but I ought to work on the seventies stuff.
XL: Pamela Sargent, Cloned Lives
Novel assembled from a number of rewritten stories, where one response to the world falling apart is to clone people (as in Where Once The Sweet Birds Sang) and then to get out of here. Six copies of Paul are made: four men, and, for scientific balance, two women. On the surface, the five survivors are very different, in part because of their choice of educational programmes, but their thought patterns are similar. There's not the same sense of the tension of the individual and the group as in the Wilhelm, and there's a scientific twist in the tail that's visible a good two chapters before the end.
Fourth of the Charlie Parler novels, in which the private detective heads south to investigate the case of a black man who may have been wrongly accused of a murder. Meanwhile one of the villains from the previous books may be about to be released on bail - funded by the KKK - and would no doubt seek revenge.
I suspect Connolly's structure is too baroque for it's own good; ostensibly Parker is the first person narrator, but we also get to points where he is not present, and where he could have no knowledge of what happened. Viewpoints don't have to be fixed, of course, but it seems more to be about keeping the plates spinning than aesthetics. It is gripping, and is still suggesting there is more to the world than the natural. Angel and Louis, Connoly's favoured deux ex machina, are little more than cameos. I have the next two in the series (bought in Whitstable), but I ought to work on the seventies stuff.
XL: Pamela Sargent, Cloned Lives
Novel assembled from a number of rewritten stories, where one response to the world falling apart is to clone people (as in Where Once The Sweet Birds Sang) and then to get out of here. Six copies of Paul are made: four men, and, for scientific balance, two women. On the surface, the five survivors are very different, in part because of their choice of educational programmes, but their thought patterns are similar. There's not the same sense of the tension of the individual and the group as in the Wilhelm, and there's a scientific twist in the tail that's visible a good two chapters before the end.
