WALK THROUGH DARKNESS

Name: WALK THROUGH DARKNESS
Author: David Anthony Durham
ISBN: 0-385-49925-6

by David Anthony Durham ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

The sheer power of its core material makes Walk Through Darkness intermittently gripping and affecting, but far too much of...

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The long arm of coincidence and an overload of what seems very like wish-fulfillment mar this potentially moving story of a runaway slave’s northward odyssey, the successor to Durham’s flawed but deservedly praised first novel Gabriel’s Story (2001).

It consists of two parallel narratives. The primary one follows William “Humboldt’s” flight (in 1854) from the Maryland tidewater plantation where he had remained after his pregnant wife Dover was brought by her mistress north, to Philadelphia. Interpolated italicized chapters and passages chart the progress of Andrew Morrison, a Scottish immigrant and hunter hired by William’s owner to retrieve the latter’s “property.” The story is best in the early going, as Durham’s obviously thorough research and deep empathy with his subject create vivid pictures of Morrison’s haunted past and William’s successive ordeals, including incarceration in a slave compound followed by a bloody rebellion during which he escapes again, rescue by a ship whose compassionate captain refuses the demands of Southern slaveholders, and William’s embattled passage to Philadelphia and reunion with Dover. So far, so good—except when characters like saintly fellow fugitive Lemuel and Northern freedman Redford Prince are permitted to lecture us about such issues as the Fugitive Slave Law and the brotherhood of man. And the novel collapses into ludicrous contrivance when Durham (as unsubtly as can be imagined) links the guilty secret in Morrison’s past with William’s clouded paternity and personal history. One understands that Durham’s point is (as Faulkner made clear again and again in his fiction) the degree to which all our histories intersect and are interdependent. But his story’s thrust is so weighted toward melodramatic oversimplification that one thinks, while reading it, less of earlier literary fiction built on similar themes than of the TV version of Roots.

The sheer power of its core material makes Walk Through Darkness intermittently gripping and affecting, but far too much of its content simply defies credibility. One wonders if it’s actually Durham’s first novel.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-385-49925-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RISEN
by David Anthony Durham

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SACRED BAND
by David Anthony Durham

- BOOK REVIEW
THE OTHER LANDS
by David Anthony Durham

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.