The Third Alternative
Wiseguy wannabe Capac Raimi comes to the City and is taken under the wing of all powerful crimelord The Cardinal, becoming a man of power and influence. But success in his chosen career opens the door to a world of mysteries. Why can Raimi remember so little of his life before the City? What are The Cardinal’s real motives? How do people disappear so completely that no one except him even remembers them? Who or what are the Ayuamarcans? Raimi’s search for the truth leads him to a group of Incan priests with an agenda of their own.
This is a first novel, and it shows. The publisher’s bumpf compares O’Shaughnessy to Banks and Barker, but that’s just wishful thinking. He shares some of their fascination with the underbelly of life, but lacks the artistry to transform it into anything more. His writing is at best workmanlike and at times lapses into the sort of gaucherie editors are paid to keep well away from the rest of us, including what must be an early contender for the year’s worst sex scene, with such infelicities as ‘foliaged oasis’, ‘liquid pool of life and love’, and ‘my sabre, her scabbard’. The plot is about as unlikely as it gets, with a negligent attitude towards reality, though it does rally towards the end and, to be fair, this is billed as The City Book 1, so more explication might be forthcoming. Instead of characterisation we get overwrought caricature. Raimi is thoroughly charmless and unappealing, a jumped up Nazi in a designer suit. In more subtle hands his story might have been a powerful study of corruption and lost humanity, but all we have here is a second rate comic book adventure.
Reviewed by Peter Tennant
23. December 2009 at 00:24
Picking up on Tennant’s “lost humanity”, and other references to “thin” characterisation…
The story is told from the first person, by something that one later discovers is in fact rather less than human. By this time, a sense of unease had developed in my mind, due to what was missing in what I had read. The story went on to answer the questions that arose as a result of this.
This is a subtle skill, painting a picture by what is left out, rather than what is explicitly mentioned. If you read the book expecting it to be “normal” and see deviations as quality faiure, you won’t “get” it as you would if you were to allow yourself to be immersed in its world.
As an example of what I mean, consider the way in which moral outrage is raised by Vonnegut versus P K Dick. With Vonnegut, you know how you are supposed to feel about things, even as he disclaims “do it goes”. With Dick, things are simply laid out as they are, and your outrage is in part due to the lack of this in the writing.
Vonnegut’s approach works fine if “pereaching to the choir”, but Dick’s may be more effective in changing the minds of those who may not have agreed with the writer’s values.