The ending was quite good… brilliant, even, but I had to grit my teeth and listen through (audiobook) Bruen’s painfully too self-aware jack Taylor for the first four and a half hours (of a five hour reading).

I know that Bruen’s got a shining reputation as a master of Irish hard boiled crime fiction, but I find it too heavy handed, too obviously written, to be enjoyable as a story.

This was, I was hoping, my steal of the trip. We were heading home, lugging carry on and two small children through Shannon’s lovely concourse, and we stumbled upon Hughes & Hughes massive sale going on. When I say we stumbled upon it I mean that we’d gotten forewarning of it when my sister-in-law and family had reported the going out of business sale at the airport arm of the bookseller, so we didn’t quite stumble upon it so much as we targeted it like a book-seeking missile.

We loaded up a bag or two of books, and headed to security, happy with our haul. It was a mix of business books (not mine, quoth, err, me), kiddie books for the, umm, kids, a fiction of varying prospects. I like to go for local authors when we’re back, and David Rice was local by way of a trip or two round the world and into the priesthood, even. So he was my great hope. Even moreso than the insufferable John Banville writing as the (presumably) less sufferable Benjamin Black. I’ve bought two Benjamin Black novels by now, and I haven’t touched a one, for fear he turns out to be as painful to read as he was writing as himself.

So it was with great pleasure that I settled down with the Rice book once we were marginally adjusted to being back home in the States.

The story… well, here are the basics:

There is a massive nuclear reactor in England which has a dubious safety record, handles nuclear waste from all over the world, there is a woman journalist tasked with writing about it for her paper, there is a television priest doing a documentary on the last days of Pompeii and he has a feeling, a sneaking feeling that the manic behavior that gripped the people of Pompeii in their last days, which they refused to believe could be their last days (simply because it was inconceivable, which is, itself, the Pompeii Syndrome of the title), well, that manic behavior was exhibiting itself now, so what was the inconceivable disaster they could all face? There’s a Middle Eastern sheik with his castle, software plant, and theme park in Galway, staffed entirely by people from the Middle East and none at all from the west of Ireland. There’s also the country’s (Ireland) main anti-terrorist policeman, Black Jack, as he’s known, who is scared, during the course of the novel, by a woman out of her mind with Alzheimer’s disease who chases him with a frying pan.

It’s an… okay, I suppose, crack at a story. The idea was interesting-ish enough. Somewhere, though, David Rice read a book about writing in which the advice given went something like this:

bq. “Show, don’t tell the dear Reader what is happening.”

Unfortunately, this advice was taken to mean that, so long as he doesn’t explicitly come out and write something like:

bq. Jack is conflicted about his role as an anti-terror policeman, and is quite smart and open-minded, really, he just finds that people follow certain stereotypes sometimes, so he looks into it, without being racist, really.

Which is a good thing. Instead, however, he writes:

bq. “Jack,” said his partner, “I know you’re conflicted about your role as an anti-terror policeman, and are quite smart and open-minded, really, and I know you just find people follow stereotypes sometimes, so you look into it, but you’re not racist, I know.”

Which is not great.

The whole thing gets unwieldy, fast. I quickly began to feel like I was being bludgeoned, which may have been a clever terrorist/torture ploy on Mr. Rice’s part. If so, good one.

By the last half of this book, unfortunately, I was reading just to get it over with. He had a few mildly entertaining twists, but I couldn’t get away from the dialogue telling me, rather than showing me anything. And the characters, whether it was the ham-handed descriptions/characterizations or something… else, just didn’t work, for me. The sheik was very one dimensional. The ranting racist West Ireland councilman was very one dimensional. The Black Jack character was… well, he was more than one dimensional, it’s just that none of the dimensions were contiguous. The reporter was… two dimensional, but again, the two dimensions were miles apart and at odds (hard to do, when you’re that far apart), and not in a good way.

At any rate, I finished the book off, and picked up another ‘find’ prospect Amazon dropped in my lap for less than a buck: Peter Spiegelman’s Black Maps, which has, so far, been a million times (roughly, and possibly adjusting for inflation) better, in terms of writing, a cohesive story, and well-paced action. Inconceivable that it could be as bad as The Pompeii Syndrome (which, again, I wouldn’t say was bad… just… difficult or tedious reading).

The front copy of the novel compares this novel to James Joyce’s Dubliners. High praise… and sort of stock compliments for Irish writers post-dating ole Jamesy. But, as I read through the first half of the book, I kept finding myself agreeing: “Yep,” I would say (inside my head, obviously, I’m not going to sit there, quietly reading a book, interrupting the quiet with an occasional outburst of commentary), “the way she writes description definitely evokes Joyce, especially his short stories like ‘A Painful Case’. The unreliable narrator recalls details which make the scenes spring out in your mind, fully-formed.” (Perhaps you can see why I’m not saying this stuff out loud… what an a—hole I’d sound like, eh?)

I like the unreliable narrator in this case. Her holey (and holy) memories begin to mount during the course of her trip to fetch her brother Liam’s body from England, where he committed suicide by walking into the sea. But as they mount, you get the sense that there is a vast gaping hole in the middle, over which she’d shoveled more memories, and some of them have to do with the event that she may or may not have witnessed in her grandmother’s front room tens of years before which may or may not have led Liam to his eventual destination. And I was fully satisfied that maybe this was the way it was going to end; the death of a brother with whom the narrator had been close and now was no longer (even before his death) leaving holes in the narrator’s sense of her history and now future, as she struggles to make sense of her own life in relation to her brother’s.

But at the funeral, the gathering of the title, well, that hole is filled in like the soul she begins making sense of somewhere in the middle… and well, then the novel revealed its own soul. And sang.

I could understand someone not making it as far as that, if they got bogged down by the description and fluttering about of the histories of her grandmother, grandfather, Lamb Nugent, mother, father, and siblings. Someone who got fed up with the itch that the holes in the histories were making. But I’d also say that sticking it through to the end is well, well worth it.

I was expecting, though I can’t recall why, now, to be blown away by Ken Bruen’s tough guy character Jack Taylor.

Well, I wasn’t blown away, which I guess counts as a disappointment. It was a fair enough book, a quick enough read, but it was missing… something.

Or possibly it wasn’t missing enough. Ken’s character seemed just a bit too introspective, a bit too philosophical for a tough guy trying to track down a priest’s killer who may or may not have been justified in the killing.

I have The Guards (the first in the Jack Taylor series, I believe) somewhere in my bookshelf, but after this one, I’m not in any hurry to go out and start on that one. Sure, I’ll get to it at some point, but I’ve got a Joe Lansdale, Robert Parker, Donald Westlake, and even a Benjamin Black to try out before I get back to ol’ Kenny boy.

I really, really enjoyed this book. I’d heard about the odd choice of point-of-view for the story, but it worked incredibly well.

The book is written in the first person plural, about which I initially (before picking it up) had misgivings. But it worked really, really well. Even when the fact that this somewhat different point-of-view faded into the background and the narrative rose to the fore it was the perfect way to tell the story Joshua Ferris cooked up.

It’s the book most people think they can write; those people sitting in an office all day with their cubicles and assorted cubicle flotsam keeping them company along with thoughts of escaping to another desk, at home, in front of a typewriter or computer. Or maybe a comfy chair at a non-closed Starbucks, pretending to write that next great American novel of the workplace and its soul-blanching tedium.

The characters Ferris assembled in this office, and the odd bond they share over the course of events (and non-events) captures exactly what a lot of these would-be novelists experience, and experience to such a degree that they feel compelled to comment on the circumstances.

So Starbucks or cubicled novelists, listen up! Stop! You’re going to have to write something else. Maybe about the pleasant people in Starbucks. Or how your writing is significantly different when you write down the street in the Dunkin Donuts because the coffee’s better (well, the sugar levels are better) and the atmosphere is completely different. Who knows? But Joshua Ferris has done a fantastic job, from start to finish how a lot of these things end… and he does it lyrically.

A mini-review, if you will.

I didn’t like this book, at all, for the most part. Sure, it was funny. But for John O’Farrell, well, it wasn’t quite up to snuff. It was heavy-handed, awkward, and tedious, at times.

Until the end. About a page or two from the end, where I didn’t think he’d do anything at all to redeem the book and was just reading it to get it forever off my bedside table and banished to some mostly unreachable corner of the bookshelf, he did it. It may have been the germ that ignited the whole book for him, and he just got bogged down in the details along the way, or he may have finally hit his stride after dealing with these characters all the way along. But whatever it was, I would say the end was nearly worth it for me, slogging through all the rest.

The biggest flaw with this book so far (I’m about a third of the way through) is, like Jude: Level One, is that the back jacket copy compares the book to John Kennedy Toole’s excellent A Confederacy of Dunces. Whoops.

I desperately want to like this book (I have no idea why, though), but there’s no way it’s a patch on Confederacy… it’s fine, so far, if a bit heavy-handed and awkward in spots. So we’ll see how the rest of it goes.

Back on Gravity’s Rainbow in the lead up to our next child being born, as I expect I won’t have the a) energy or b) time to read for a few months after the little tyke shows up, cap in hand, at our doorstep, or down our chimney. Whichever.

At any rate, still a great read, it’s no wonder Pynchon appreciated the guest appearances on the Simpsons enough to appear a few times, himself, Imipolex G makes a few guest semi-hidden appearances throughout Slothrop’s time in bombed out Berlin…

Before Further Fenway Fiction came out, this was the Greatest Book Ever. Now it’s the second.

Still good, though, and well worth reading, for the seven Americans who continue to read, based on the last study.

This is possibly the greatest collection of fiction ever written.

Working through the author copies I received the other day.