The City by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on July 1, 2014

All great cities have a soul. At the age of eight, Jonah Kirk meets a woman who tells him she is the soul of the city made flesh. Jonah calls her Pearl. He introduces the reader to Pearl when, at 57, he starts dictating the book we are reading. Jonah attributes the appearance of new piano in the community center (and thus the beginning of his career in music) to Pearl, whose connection to the supernatural is immediately apparent to the reader, if not to young Jonah.

Despite the supernatural elements that you would expect in a Dean Koontz novel, The City is not the kind of story that Koontz typically tells (a fact that may disappoint Koontz fans). The City is a tale of crime and conspiracy, but I liked it less for its moderately engaging plot than for its cast of fully developed characters. Among other topics, the early chapters of The City recount Jonah's love of his mother and grandparents and his difficult relationship with his (mostly) absentee father. The occasional appearances of Jonah's father build a sense of dread, as do the dreams that sometimes trouble Jonah's sleep. One is about a dead girl named Fiona Cassidy. Another is about Lucas Drackman, who murdered his parents. Not unexpectedly, both figures make threatening appearances in Jonah's life. Perhaps the dreams are prophetic, but prophecies are easily misinterpreted. Still, this is a novel that builds characters more than it builds suspense.

Courage and heroism are among the novel's driving themes. The City reminds us that those qualities are exhibited by ordinary people every day. "And one form of heroism," Koontz writes, "is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness seems justified, having the strength to persevere when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless." Courage is, in part, the ability to overcome adversity and fear, but it is also the ability to overcome anger and guilt -- a wise lesson the novel teaches repeatedly.

To an even larger extent, The City is about the power of friendship. When Jonah needs help understanding the evil that has entered his life, he turns to the Japanese-American tailor in his building who has become his friend. The tailor enlists the help of his own friends, who seek help from their friends, and so on, each acting solely from the desire to help a friend. Another key character is Malcolm Pomerantz, a child prodigy with the saxophone who becomes Jonah's lifelong friend at the age of ten. Malcolm is a misfit but his beautiful older sister is the personification of grace and sweetness. She is white, Jonah is black, but (like Malcolm and the tailor and Jonah's grandfather) she does not view race as a barrier to friendship.

A related theme of The City is the power of kindness. Many of Koontz' characters (from neighbors to cab drivers to victims of Japanese internment camps) are exceptionally (perhaps unbelievably) kind. It is a way of life for them to do good and unselfish deeds for others, friends and strangers alike. Kindness, Koontz seems to be saying, is the antidote to evil, even if it cannot shield us from evil acts or tragic events. And if the goodness and generosity of the characters makes them difficult to believe, I think Koontz intended them as archetypes, as models of the people we should all aspire to be.

Koontz establishes the time (mid-1960s) and place with great clarity. The focus, of course, is on historical events that increase the novel's atmosphere of dread: race riots, serial murders, bombings, and other violent episodes contribute to the reader's sense of unease. Balanced against that chaotic environment is chaos of a different sort, expressed by Jonah's love of music, from the jazz standards that his mother and grandparents extoll to the Beatles, Dylan, Motown, and the explosion of artists and musical forms that characterize the time. The City might not appeal to readers searching for a strong, plot-driven narrative, but even if The City told no story at all, it would be a joy to read for its evocation of a tumultuous and musical decade. It is made all the better by the moving moments in the story it tells and by its memorable characters.

RECOMMENDED

The Red Room by Ridley Pearson

Published by Putnam on June 17, 2014

John Knox and Grace Chu meet their handler, a fellow named Dulwich, inside the secure Red Room at Rutherford Risk to receive their latest assignment. Knox needs money to pay for medication that helps his brother's emotional disorder. The mission he reluctantly accepts involves the delivery of stolen art to Istanbul, followed by a meeting with an important man. Why it is necessary to spend five minutes with the man is something Dulwich will not explain, although he assures Knox that he is not setting up a target for assassination. Chu's role initially involves cyber intelligence (her specialty), but she later joins Knox doing the field work that she prefers.

The Red Room has the kind of tradecraft and chase scenes that add excitement to a spy novel, but the secret to a successful espionage thriller is intrigue -- the hidden motivation, the unforeseen betrayal. The intrigue here involves the true purpose of the meeting that Knox and Chu are meant to have with the buyer of the stolen art. The reason they need to spend five minutes with the buyer is clever although it seems like a convoluted way to accomplish a task that could surely have performed with considerably less effort.

As the plot moves toward the payoff, Ridley Pearson provides a good bit of repetitive information -- about the mission, about the characters, about past missions -- that serves no useful purpose other than contributing to the novel's word count. Still, the novel moves quickly and although much of it is less than gripping, it always held my interest. The last few chapters are particularly intense.

It takes a particular skill that Pearson has not mastered to write a novel in the present tense. I was also annoyed by Pearson's sentence fragments. The technique is meant to communicate a sense of swift action but in this case I thought it communicated substandard English. That is not to say that Pearson is an incapable writer, but I would probably have enjoyed this novel more if he had written it in a different style.

The Red Room makes frequent references to earlier events involving Knox and Chu that I assume are chronicled in the two previous Risk Agent novels. I haven't read those and, while The Red Room is not a bad novel, it does not inspire me to do so.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

First published in Australia in 2013; published by Simon & Schuster in hardcover on October 1, 2013 and in paperback on June 3, 2014

The Rosie Project is written in the first person using a stuffy, intellectualized voice that is perfectly consistent with the stuffy, intellectualized narrator, Don Tillman. If you've seen Doc Martin, you have an idea of what Tillman is like. Not many novels make me laugh out loud, but the Tillman character in The Rosie Project managed to do that repeatedly.

A professor of genetics, Tillman is insensitive, obsessive, inflexible about his daily schedule, socially awkward, extremely bright, and unable to solve the Wife Problem (i.e., he has no chance of finding one). He regards emotion as an annoying distraction and admires people with Asperger's because they they lack emotional connections that impair the ability to focus. At romance, Tillman is hopeless. Almost all women consider him an unsuitable partner (blunt rudeness is not charming) and he considers almost all women unsuitable, particularly if they waste his time with small talk, horoscopes, fashion, religion, homeopathy, or pretty much anything else that isn't related to a stirring discussion of science.

A systematic effort to find a wife using questionnaires affirms that no women meet his standards. The Wife Project is a flop until his friend (he has only two, the other being his friend's wife) fixes him up with Rosie. She is, Tillman concludes, completely unsuitable as a wife -- she's a vegetarian, a smoker, bad at math, and habitually late -- but as he helps her with a project of her own (determining the identity of her biological father), Tillman is perplexed to find that he enjoys her company. But is he equipped to love her?

The Rosie Project follows the course that is expected of a romantic comedy, but the course is not entirely predictable despite leading to the kind of ending that the genre demands. The plot thread involving the mystery of Rosie's father adds an additional layer of interest to the novel. If the moral of the story -- nobody's perfect -- is obvious, that makes it no less true. The corollary to that moral -- love is expressed by a willingness to accept people as they are -- is also well illustrated. It might be possible to change your behavior, the novel suggests, but making a fundamental change of personality is a more doubtful task.

Although The Rosie Project is very funny, it also makes a serious point about using simplistic labels like "obsessive-compulsive" and "bipolar" and "Asperger's" to categorize people because their brains are "configured differently from those of the majority of humans." Regarding functional people as having a "disorder" because of the way they process information often does them a disservice. A lot of people would dislike Tillman because of his nonexistent social skills (his Dean is anxious to find an excuse to fire him despite his intellect) but others (and I am among them) would find him to be a refreshingly honest, "no BS" kind of guy. Anyway, social skills are overrated, particularly by those who have them.

In the end, the serious points the book makes are overshadowed by the laughter it inspires. The good humor that pervades The Rosie Project makes it an easy book to love.

RECOMMENDED

The Fever by Megan Abbott

Published by Little, Brown and Company on June 17, 2014

Deenie Nash is in high school, as is her brother Eli, a handsome hockey player who is a bit of a rogue. Their father, Tom, is a teacher at the school. Their mother lives elsewhere. The Fever's drama starts when Deenie's best friend, Lise, is stricken not with a fever, but with seizures. Lise is hospitalized and in a coma when Deenie's newest friend, Gabby, has something that appears to be a seizure while performing in a recital. Other symptoms begin to afflict Deenie's other friends, leading high school girls to text all sorts of inane theories to each other involving rabid bats and a polluted lake. As more girls develop symptoms, CNN turns up to report the growing hysteria.

Hysteria is the novel's driving theme. The Fever touches on the controversy surrounding the practice of giving HPV vaccinations to girls before they become sexually active, which proves to be one of the more popular explanations for the phenomenon that afflicts the girls. Other hysterical parents are convinced that a sexually transmitted disease is responsible for the illnesses despite the absence of any evidence to support that theory. The moral of The Fever is that rational thought is preferable to knee-jerk reactions. But are those parental reactions plausible? In a town populated by exceptionally ignorant people, perhaps, but that isn't how this town is portrayed. I wasn't convinced.

Hysteria might have been a better title for the novel than The Fever, which has almost nothing to do with fever. The novel is largely about teenage girls and their endless capacity for drama (not to mention their addiction to texting). The teenage characters are more interesting than the novel's few adults, all of whom spend their time fretting. They are concerned about all the risks to which their children are exposed -- radon, PCBs, lead, mercury, STDs, crime -- without giving much thought to the fact that they all survived those same risks and more.

The Fever sometimes has the atmosphere of a horror novel, other times a thriller, but it runs out of gas before it finds an identity. After a strong build-up, the resolution of the spreading symptoms is less than compelling. I liked the character development well enough to give the novel a guarded recommendation, but the central idea that drives the plot isn't developed nearly as well as the characters. That left me with a sense of disappointment when the novel ended.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Flight of the Silvers by Daniel Price

Published by Blue Rider Press on February 4, 2014

The Flight of the Silvers is the sort of offbeat science fiction that Robert Jackson Bennett or Tom Holt might write. Both of those writers, like Daniel Price, have used the multiverse theory as a basis for letting their imaginations soar. The Flight of the Silvers is perhaps a bit more conventional, the story more like a comic book without the graphic art, but its strong characters and swift pace make it a riveting read.

The Givens sisters are saved from a traffic disaster by three strangers who place them inside a bubble of slowed time, letting them walk away before the disaster engulfs them. When we pick up their lives seventeen years later, the world experiences a ten minute loss of power (electricity, batteries, magnets, and jet engines all stop working). Hannah Givens doesn't make the connection to the events of her childhood until one of the strangers appears with a silver bracelet that protects her from a falling sky. Hannah soon finds herself in a San Diego that isn't quite like the one she left behind (flying cars are an early clue that things have changed). There she encounters a cartoonist named Zack Trillinger who is wearing a similar bracelet and who has had a similar world-ending experience.

Hannah and Zack are collected by temporal physicists and taken to a building where they meet other bracelet-wearing "Silvers": Mia Farisi, fourteen and chubby; a brainy teenage Australian named David Dormer; a Filipino named Theo Maranan who has dedicated his young life to wasting his potential; and Hannah's sister Amanda. They are on a version of Earth in a different part of the multiverse that, until 1912, shared a history identical to our own. An event occurred in 1912 that eventually helped scientists learn how to mess around with time. The Silvers have been chosen (although why or by whom is not immediately clear) to live in this time-bending version of Earth because they possess certain innate abilities -- temporal superpowers of various sorts -- that are revealed as the story progresses. Theo, we hear repeatedly, is destined to have the greatest power, assuming he survives in the timeline we are following.

There are other differences between our familiar Earth and the parallel Earth that are meant (and well-taken) as cautionary statements. The parallel America has walled itself in to keep foreigners out, creating a homogenized, stagnated, and downright boring culture. That makes for an interesting setting even if it isn't what the novel is about. Perhaps this would have been a novel with greater depth if those themes had been fully explored, but that would also have added unwieldy length to the story.

At nearly 600 pages, The Flight of the Silvers might be longer than it needs to be -- and the story isn't close to being over when the novel ends -- but it never feels padded. Action and character development are well balanced. A few parts of the story are a little schmaltzy, but only a few. Most of the story involves a quest -- the Silvers are trying to reach someone named Peter Pendergen while being pursued or assisted by temporal security forces (the Deps), other empowered individuals (the Gothams), Evan Rander (who has been living the same five years over and over), and the Pelletiers (who seem to be responsible for moving the Silvers between multiverses) -- and the difference between friend and foe is often unclear, both to the Silvers and to the reader. All the action and intrigue doesn't leave much opportunity to worry about time paradoxes and all the other uncertainties that would arise if a reader gave the plot too much thought. That's probably a good thing. The action and the strong characters kept me engrossed in the novel, logic be damned.

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