ironSoap – Complete

author: Douglas Preston
name: Paul
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2011
rating: 1
read at: 2012/03/15
date added: 2012/03/15
shelves: novel
review:
I’ve been reading Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child‘s books since Relic hit the stands in paperback. I always knew they weren’t exactly literary heavyweights, but their blend of techno-thriller and plausible supernatural, semi-speculative fiction has always appealed to the 12 year-old summer blockbuster fan who lives, barely checked, inside my brain. AS I followed along with Preston and Child, I saw a world they were developing which seemed to grow sort of accidentally. Relic and Reliquary seemed initially as though they would be alone in their dealings with Special Agent Pendergast as they wrote seemingly stand-alone novels in between like Mount Dragon and Riptide. Then, starting in Thunderhead, the authors started revisiting characters, dragging Bill Smithback from Relic into the narrative until, by the end of Fever Dream (which is the tenth book starring Pendergast), most major characters from even the standalone books have heavily woven themselves into an overarching setting, with the most notable exception being Corrie Swanson from Still Life With Crows, who apparently appears again in the only Pendergast novel I’ve yet to read, Cold Vengeance.

Which is all to say that though Preston and Child seem to be fabricating a world in which crazy and outrageous things happen with alarming frequency, they can’t seem to let anything exist within a vacuum. I honestly don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing. In a way, it is rewarding to someone like me who has kept up with most of their work, but on the other hand, I’ve felt that a lot of the later books that focus on Pendergast have had the tinge of too much returning to the well. Pendergast was and still is an exceptional literary character, but he’s also kind of reached a deity-like deus ex machina status where whenever it is important for something significant to drive the plot, we suddenly find out that—lo and behold!—Pendergast has a secret background in exactly the discipline needed.

I think the authors started to recognize this, which I suspect is why they introduced us to Gideon Crew, a new protagonist who is—well, he’s sort of a deus ex machina as well: Master thief, scientist, hacker, con artist, social engineer, ladies man, etc. And this is all in just one novel. One thing Preston and Child aren’t great about is giving their characters a whole lot of obvious or even disruptive flaws.

I dunno. In reading this book, I started to kind of resent the authors for the first time. Maybe I’ve been blinded by a clinging adoration for the character of Pendergast for so long that I overlooked a lot of the authors’ flaws. But here, without the familiar framework of their created world (although, make no mistake, Gideon exists within that world; a key driver of the book’s plot is an assignment from Effective Engineering Solutions’ Eli Glinn, who first appeared in The Ice Limit and has made appearances in a few Pendergast stories; it’s only a matter of time before we see a Pendergast/Crew crossover), a lot of the seams began to show for me.

Some of them were minor quirks, like the authors’ insistence on referring to their protagonist by his full name, “Gideon Crew” instead of just Gideon or Crew, or the way they use the word “suddenly.” Others are deeper, such as the overt action-movie clichés like cars that explode after a fairly routine traffic accident or the way the hero happens to have every female character who walks onstage begging to get inside his pants. But the biggest issue I had with Gideon’s Sword is that while it’s quick and unrelenting in pace, it’s also sort of drab and unexciting in tone. Gideon himself isn’t particularly compelling as a character (the suave grifter-hero thing has been done plenty before, and better), the plot he’s working to uncover is yawn-worthy and the primary antagonist is so contrived and silly that at one point he is mentioned in the same breath as cheesy James Bond villains. The intent is to say, “no, he’s not corny like those characters,” but when I read it, I laughed out loud because he’s exactly like that: over-the-top, self-parodying.

The overall impression I got from reading Gideon’s Sword is that the authors have started phoning it in. Gideon Crew doesn’t re-energize their creativity the way I had hoped; he doesn’t seem to present them with any sort of creative challenges to stretch their writing and just wanders through the whole book either getting ridiculously lucky or just happening to have the right tool at the right time (or get a groan-inducing stroke of serendipity, a phrase which basically summarizes the final thirty pages without “spoiling” it) and the result is something that feels terribly, depressingly disposable. I have to wonder how long this book can even stay in my head, such is its blandness.

I can’t say I hated Gideon’s Sword, because that would suggest some kind of strong emotional reaction to it. Instead, I had practically zero opinion about it. It was a book. It had some characters. Some things happened to them. There was set-up for a sequel (oh look! here it is: Gideon’s Corpse). It ended. I moved on to a different book. This sort of apathy about entertainment is the exact opposite of why I like to read and if I wanted this kind of mental teflon effect, I could just watch TV or something. Normally I’d say Preston and Child are my guilty pleasure authors, but in this case they’ve become my guilty displeasure and I’m on the brink of giving them a wide berth. In my review for Fever Dream I hinted that I wasn’t sure where there was left to go in this world the authors have created. Now that I see part of the future, I’m not sure I care to find out.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — March 15, 2012 at 05:28PM