Sat 11 Apr 2015
Review: DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Lost Island.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Lost Island. Grand Central, hardcover, 2014; paperback, March 2015.
Between them, the pair of authors Preston and Child have written and co-written a list of titles that fills a page, just before the title page. I’ve always meant to read one, and now I finally have. All things considered, I may not have picked the best one to start with.
To begin with, while Preston and Child are best known for their series of books about someone called Pendergast, this is the third in a new series featuring an adventurer named Gideon Crew. It doesn’t matter so much that this is the third one; it’s that when this one ends Gideon is ready to continue the adventure right into the fourth one. I always hate that when it happens.
But even worse is that this gets more and more uninteresting as the book goes on. I hate it even more when that happens. It begins with Gideon stealing a page from the Book of Kells from its state-of-the-art guarded case in Manhattan museum, one of the most audacious ventures I can imagine you can imagine, and it continues on with Gideon’s employer chemically removing the hand-colored print from the page, completely destroying it.
The madness behind this action? A treasure map, one not leading to gold or other sundry valuables, but a secret with all-but-magical healing powers. And off Gideon goes to find it, discovering as he does so that he is retracing steps taken by others before him in the realm of Greek mythology.
But with rather ordinary obstacles along the way: treasure-hunting pirates, a shipwreck, a unknown tribe of natives who believe in human sacrifice — each of step the way turning disaster into just coincidentally one step further in the right direction.
The final obstacle is not so ordinary, but by that time the pedestrian writing and less than compelling dialogue had me caught in a bind. I’d spent a lot of time getting to that point myself. Should I give up, or try to redeem my input to this point and garner whatever output I could get? I tossed a mental coin and I went on, and while I’m glad I did, I probably made the wrong decision.
In my opinion, as far as this book is concerned — I certainly can’t vouch for their earlier work — I think Preston and Child are writing for young adults. I’d state that as a fact if it weren’t for all of the bloody meaningless deaths that occur, especially toward the end of the book. Of course maybe that’s what young adults are reading these days, instead of the Hardy Boys and their motorcycle and roadster. I have to admit that that is something I just don’t know.
April 12th, 2015 at 2:51 am
I wish Preston & Child were good, because they have some good ideas. Perhaps if they slowed production down considerably the books would be a lot better.
April 12th, 2015 at 6:53 pm
I’m not fond of this series, it just goes nowhere for me. The most interesting thing about it is that they use characters from other books such as ICE LIMIT creating a unified world more or less, but the prose in these is pedestrian and Gideon dull — at times I wonder if the two are actually doing the writing it is so different than their other books.
Do read the Pendergast novels, though as thrillers, not detective stories. Pendergast is a Sherlockian hero in an epic adventure that deals in wide screen myth building and while the writing is not brilliant the ideas and execution are entertaining. The book I would start with is BRIMSTONE, which has as its villain an immortal version of Wilkie Collins Count Fosco replete with mouse scampering in his waistcoat. After that the two books DANCE OF DEATH/BOOK OF THE DEAD which pit Pendergast against his Moriarity, his brother Dionysus.
I find Pendergast an interesting enough character to forgive a lot of flaws and I like the continuing characters. That said Preston and Child’s best books are probably ICE LIMIT, RIPTIDE, and RELIC (first of the Pendergast novels though he isn’t in the film — the film is a good example of their strengths).
The Pendergast novels have more in common with the feuilliton’s of Eugene Sue, Dumas, Paul Feval, and Ponson du Terrail (the Rocambole saga)with a bit of classic Gothick thrown in. The pleasures of the books are as an epic in wide screen prose with a hero who is a mix of Sherlock Holmes, Edmund Dantes, Lamont Cranston, and Richard Wentworth with occasional forays into Hamlet.
It’s epic pulp, surprisingly atmospheric, widescreen Technicolor, Indiana Jones/James Bond/Harry Potter/Star Wars style fiction, and that is the reason to read them. The Gideon books fail because they are an attempt at just doing standard thrillers and it doesn’t seem to be their forte. For me I rank them with James Rollins, Cussler, and Ted Bell as pure escapists fun, though I grant you may decry their tendency to write trilogies weighing in at around 1200 pages total.
The Gideon books are a series, the Pendergast novels are a saga. A saga has a good deal more room for occasional mistakes and slips and flaws because of the readers commitment to it. That said, you can dip in with the books BRIMSTONE, CABINET OF CURIOSITIES, WHEEL OF DEATH, or STILL LIFE WITH CROWS and not need to read the others to enjoy them, though their true strength is as a saga.
April 15th, 2015 at 7:46 am
I have always been tempted to start reading one of the Pendergast books, David. Others have told me how much they enjoy them, but all in all, this one in the Gideon Crew series is going to make it one and done for Lincoln and Child for me.
One big reason is the amount of commitment on my part to start. BRIMSTONE, the one you recommended, is over 700 pages long in itself. It would take me well over a month of bedtime reading to read.
Not only that, but in retrospect I am also beginning like LOST ISLAND less and less, even to the point of an active dislike. Even if it was written using a different approach than they do their Pendergast books, I was so turned off, I really don’t want to spend money on anything else by them. Not with so many other books I have here on hand and still haven’t read. I’m quite content to enjoy your description of them only — a small vicarious pleasure!