Thu 2 Apr 2015
JEFFERY DEAVER – The October List. Grand Central Publishing, hardcover, 2013; trade paperback, October 2014; mass market paperback, February 2015.
I don’t like to review books I don’t read all the way through, and I almost never do, but there wouldn’t be any use for the word “exception” if exceptions didn’t exist. I read the first 65 pages of this one, stopped, read the last chapter, and that was all.
The concept is true tour de force quality. Can a thriller novel be written in exact reverse chronological order and still make sense? The answer, in my opinion, is yes, but for me it worked only by reading the first 65 pages and then the last, which is really the first.
And I guarantee you, if you stick it out and read the book as written, back to front, the ending beginning will knock your socks off. Figuratively speaking, of course.
But I found myself, after reading a chapter, going back (or forward) to find out what I’d missed in the previous later one, and after I got as far as I did, and seeing that there were still nearly 300 pages to go, I quit. I bailed out, I cheated, and I probably shouldn’t even be reviewing this book. But over a third of the people leaving comments on Amazon gave it one star. That should also tell you something.
It was an experiment worth doing, and only someone with a devious mind such as Jeffrey Deaver’s could have hoped to have pulled it off. In my opinion, he didn’t, but I’m not you, and you may be up to challenge, the one posed to the reader as well as the author, whereas I wasn’t.
April 2nd, 2015 at 5:21 pm
I’ve tried Deaver a couple of times and never got further than about thirty pages.
April 2nd, 2015 at 6:10 pm
The one other book of Deaver’s that I’ve read was a collection of short stories. It may have been TWISTED. In any case, all the blurbs for the book said, and I’m paraphrasing, be prepared to be surprised with the twist ending for each and every one of these stories.
A bad marketing ploy, in a way. I did buy the book, but with that kind of challenge, I read the first story, figured out the twist ending about half way through, and I never read another one.
But I still have the book. OCTOBER LIST is up for sale on Amazon right now. I no longer have room to keep books I’ll never need to read again.
April 2nd, 2015 at 11:05 pm
I didn’t even get through his James Bond novel, CARTE BLANCHE, which says a lot.
C. Daly King did something a bit like this with OBELISTS FLY HIGH which begins with an epilogue and ends with the prologue — it is a minor masterpiece and a not quite tour de force, but the best of the King novels.
I give him credit for attempting it though. Considering he doesn’t have to make the effort, trying is something.
I suspect most of todays bestselling writers would think all the passengers on the train turning out to be tied together as the killer was original.
I’m not sure you can pull off a real tour de force in the genre unless you are deeply read in it and know what has and hasn’t been done. It’s hard to come up with something truly new in a genre that has been kicking around off and on since 1791.
April 2nd, 2015 at 11:56 pm
I assume that you are referring to Deaver in your third paragraph, David, when you give him credit for trying. I agree. No one could have done as well with the concept than he did with this book, and when I said that the ending (beginning) will knock your socks off, I mean it. Now that I know the full story, from end to beginning, I’d have to say that you have to swallow at least one huge implausibility, and maybe more, but in many ways, especially from a writer’s point of view, this book is really a gem.
April 3rd, 2015 at 12:53 am
Yes, I mean Deaver, sorry that wasn’t clear.
We’ve talked about this but there is something missing in many of todays best known writers, some quality I can’t quote define, that won’t let me get into them or their work even when it is interesting.
They seem to hold me at arms length as a reader as if they are only letting the reader so far in so that reading them is like wading in the baby pool when you want to go in over your head with the full experience.
In some cases they are better writers technically than the ones who I may have read earlier, but they don’t involve me. The characters seem to lack dimension and the there is something shallow that lesser writers from the past still managed to convey.
I can’t get involved with a Patterson or Grisham, its all surface cleverness, but with no real depth even when the plot should be more involving at that level. I rely too much on the analogy, but too often the characters have no more depth that those on an average television series with even soap opera elements continuing from book to book not involving me.
I was no fan of Dell Shannon as a writer or her politics, but Luis Mendoza, whether I liked him or not, had a kind of reality about him I see too seldom in books today. The same even for a writer as mechanical as Erle Stanley Gardner could be — at least in the later Mason’s.
There is a conviction missing in too many of the big names writing that even minor writers seemed to capture in the past. Maybe because in the past they were writing books, and today you are getting screenplays with narrative too often.
Lately cinematic is no longer a compliment from me if they don’t also manage literary.
April 3rd, 2015 at 12:35 pm
Since I’ve read nothing by either Patterson or Grisham, and only briefly sampled Deaver’s work, I can hardly say, but my sense is that while all three could be lumped together as thriller writers, Deaver is in a category apart from the other two in that he specializes on surprise endings, as the old-fashioned detective writers used to do, only dressed up in modern terms and settings.
Is that a fair assessment? (I’m sorry that that first sentence turned out to be such a long one.)
April 3rd, 2015 at 4:47 pm
Thriller writer is a good description of them and many of the best selling lot, but in the past that term meant writers like Victor Canning, Geoffrey Household, Gavin Lyall, and ‘suspense’ writers like MacDonald, Charles Williams, Joseph Hayes, Dick Francis, Margaret Millar, Dorothy Hughes, Mary Stewart.
That level of writing is rarer today though there are exceptions like Andrew Kaplan, Nelson de Mille, Greg Isles, Val McDearmid, Greg Rucka, or Michael Kortya. Maybe it’s because the publishers require such big books (most thriller ideas don’t really warrant 250 to 350 thousand words), but most of the writers like Patterson, Pearson, Deaver, Grisham, Balldacci, write prolix, style less, Dick and Jane books plagued by sloppy plotting, inconsistencies, and implausible coincidence that the most arch Golden Age Detective novel would frown on.
I have tried to read these writers, and while some of their work make good movies, they don’t make good novels, hence the cinematic remark.
Don’t get me wrong, you can write thick brilliant thrillers. I just finished Dan Simmons massive DROOD and would not have trimmed a word or comma of its close to 400 K words, but in general it is tough to write a taut thriller or suspense novel that runs over a quarter of a million words.
A quarter of a million anything, no matter how good, has trouble being ‘taut’ by definition.
April 4th, 2015 at 6:55 am
I know a lot of people who love Deaver, but then a lot of people must buy and read James Patterson too, right? Deaver is (it seems to me) a lot better writer but I’ve found him very uneven. Like Steve, I’ve read a couple of his short story collections. I also read the first Lincoln Rhyme book (THE BONE COLLECTOR) but never felt the need to read another. I would recommend the stand-alone A MAIDEN’S GRAVE.