“‘How can you tell he’s American from a grainy shot like that?’
‘He doesn’t look like a man whose face is burdened by centuries of history,’ said Falcon. ‘He has the innocence of someone who’s spent his life embracing the future.’”The trouble with the book, though, even as the closer to a series, is that it’s overburdened by backstory. There’s an art to writing a standalone volume of an ongoing series. The easy way to compensate for the extension of a story over many volumes is to privilege character over plot; this leads to those hugely multi-volume series (Sue Grafton, say, or Janet Evanovich) with monster-of-the-week plotting and soap-opera involvement in character. Wilson, to his credit, doesn’t do this; on the other hand, this novel is so wrapped up in the aftereffects of a previous one that the first quarter of the book is unintelligible without it, or at least thoroughly uninteresting — it takes the book rather a long time to work itself into the present.
July 12, 2010, 3:42pm Comments
