REVIEW OF I AM PILGRIM

REVIEW BY TOM

I Am Pilgrim: If HBW&tEotW is all about duality, I Am Pilgrim is positively quadrophenic, because that’s at least how many mysteries are packed into its 800+ pages.  A murder in New York, a bullet-riddled assassination in Greece, the ultimate terror act across most of Southwest Asia, and a murder in Bodrum all collide in the ruins of an ancient Roman gladiator arena.  The plot devices are far-fetched, the coincidences would make Dickens blush, and the characters are barely individualised versions of cinema archetypes, but it’s the best pot-boiler I’ve read in a long time.  I like that it’s ambitious in its scope.  I like even more that it’s written in a straight-ahead style that keeps all the attention on the action and characters. And I like best of all that 800 pages felt like 300.  No, it is not great literature, but I think it’s a near-classic of its genre.  

**** Stars

REVIEW OF HARD BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD

REVIEW BY TOM

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A double-barrelled title for a book about duality, the first novel in what has become the distinguished oeuvre of Haruki Murakami. The odd-numbered chapters, each titled with three descriptions of subjects the subject chapter contains, take place in the narrative past set in an egg-shaped, walled enclave not unlike the “The Village” in the TV show The Prisoner. The even-numbered chapters take place in the narrative present not so much in a place as in a state of mind (the eponymous End of the World).  Both settings are skewed versions of our own spaceship Earth, like the milieus of Kafka's The Trial and The Castle. Indeed, from this book Murakami would go on to forge a career as the contemporary Kafka (after all, he wrote a novel called Kafka on the Shore) that certainly reaches an apex in the one other Murakami book I’ve read, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. That book manages to create a world only slightly divergent from our own in a way that is truly unnerving.  Here, Murakami is just beginning to learn his craft, and the result is two worlds too abstract for that combination of frustration and foreboding that is the essence of nightmares.  Still, HBW&tEotW is an admirable flight of fancy with promise that has been certainly fulfilled.  

***½