The Daily Sabbatical

Graham Greene was never a show off.  He was not the sort of writer that shot off flares with every sentence or attempted to change the way language worked.  He is best known, in fact, as a writer of suspenseful, twisting tales of intrigue with a sprinkling of wry humour and subtle irony.  He was, however, a master, a complete, undeniable master, and for proof look no further than The Power and the Glory.

Published in 1940, The Power was the pinnacle of the novels most influenced by his Catholicism, a creed he adopted in his early twenties.  The novel follows a priest moving through the shadows in Tabasco in the 30s when the redshirts were in power.  Catholicism and religion in general is being stamped out, and most other priests have either fled, broken their vows, or died at the firing line.  Our unnamed protagonist is not a glorified picture of piety, however.  He is a “whiskey priest,” dualing with the bottle and haunted by his bastard child, the fruit of his misdeeds.  He is a torn man, convinced of his unworthiness but dedicated to his mission which is itself a cloudy affair.  His duty is to continue his flight, but his inclination is to lay down and die.

Despite the religious themes driving the novel, Greene is never heavy handed.  The priest’s plight stems from his belief in a power that transcends the world, but his existence is humblingly human and his anguish is undeniably mortal.  The Power and the Glory could have been penned as easily by a non-believer.  It feels, in fact, like a Cormac McCarthy novel perhaps spliced with something by Mario Vargos Llosa.

Most importantly, the writing here is superb:

The squad of police made their way back to the station.  They walked raggedly with rifles slung anyhow: ends of cotton where buttons should have been: a puttee slipping down over the ankle: small men with black secret Indian eyes.  The little plaza on the hill-top was lighted with globes strung together in threes and joined by trailing overhead wires.  The Treasury, the Presidencia, a dentist’s, the prison–a low white colonaded building which dated back three hundred years–and then the steep street down past the back wall of a ruined church: whichever way you went you came ultimately wo water and to river.  Pink classical facades peeled off and showed the mud beneath, and the mud slowly reverted to mud.  Round the plaza the evening went on–women in one direction, men in the other; young me in red shirts milled boisterously round the gaseosa stalls.

So starts chapter two.  Great rhythm–the repetition of mud alone makes the paragraph.  If you haven’t read Greene, this would be one to put on your list.

I bought this book on the strength of the dustjacket blurbs.  Thom Jones, Dan Chaon, Julie Orringer, Kevin Brockmeier, Adam Johnson and Peter Orner all write as if this is the debut novel we’ve all been waiting for.  It also promised to be a genre bender of the sort that has increasingly gained in popularity (in no small part, I think, due to the encouragement of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.)  A young cop with rich brat high-school friends patrols the cemetery garrison of San Francisco and finds himself waging a war against a band of dead criminals.  Ok, cool enough.  Brett Easton Ellis meets Raymond Chandler meets Stephen King.  Sounds great if author Doug Dorst can pull it off and all blurbs point to the fact that he does.

He doesn’t.  It’s not that Dorst is a poor writer.  He’s clearly talented, and he has the makings of some very good work here.  As it stands, however, the book seems like a patchwork of false starts and unfulfilled promises.  There are simply too many narrative strands here that don’t get fully woven into the tale and that set expectations that don’t get met.  The ghost story remains temptingly in the background, and never really gets, um, fleshed out.  Our hero, Mike Mercer, has problems in his relationships to just about everyone, and while this is really the central theme of the novel, there’s little sense that he is discovering anything interesting about himself or others in the process.  We know he is estranged from his father, for example, and the old man appears to be in the neighborhood, or so we have it from the testimony of Mercer’s friends, but nothing happens.  It completely drops, only to be alluded to in the unsatisfying wrap-up as one of many things which will be resolved by the good will and bonhomie that constitutes the novel’s ending.

Writing a genre crosser is dicey, because genre’s bring along expectations.  In crime novels, we want to get to the crime, and it can feel distracting if we are burdened with too much romance, and in horror stories (which this doesn’t pretend to be, really) we want the creeps, so character development can actually get in the way.  It’s like porn with a plot: yes, yes, we know there is a mystery on the estate, but let’s get back to the butler and the chambermaid!  Genre-blending can be done, but it’s damned difficult and Alive in Necropolis doesn’t hit it.

So, why all these blurbs?  After several pages I realized: I know Chaon and Jones have Iowa Writers’ Workshop ties.  What about Dorst?  Yep: from the workshop.  The same with Orringer, Brockmeier, and Peter Orner. So, five out of six of the book’s blurbs are from the workshop at Iowa!  C’mon, guys!  So, a word to the wise: when reading book blurbs, keep an eye out for home cooking.