Why this page is here, how it is structured, and suggestions for using it
Please do not read the main part of this page, or scroll down
beyond the end of this introduction, if you have not read some of the novels or
short stories I review on this web site which are also discussed on this page,
and if you don't want them spoilt for you. These are listed at the end of this
introduction. This introduction itself is completely safe to read, and is
followed by at least a screenful of empty space to shield you from what follows.
The following introduction will probably not contain anything new to people
with even moderate experience of the Internet or of web sites, who are familiar
with the etiquette commonly used concerning "spoilers", or discussions of books
which reveal the crux of the plot. In fact, what I am about to say may seem
rather laborious to more experienced readers.
However, I provide the following explanation of this spoiler page for the
benefit of relatively inexperienced readers, who may possibly encounter the
following plot-spoiling discussions of novels they may not have read. If you
don't know exactly what a spoiler is, and can't imagine what a spoiler page
might be, I suggest you read the following explanation carefully before
scrolling further down the page, so that you don't accidentally read discussions
which may spoil a book for you before you have finished reading it.
On the Internet, "plot spoiler" is the common term for information revealed
during discussions about, or reviews of, novels or stories that disclose crucial
plot elements - things which might spoil the story for many readers, and which
shouldn't be disclosed prematurely. A simple example would be to reveal who the
murderer was in a murder mystery. And it would be an inexcusable thing to do,
unless anyone approaching this information were confronted by prominent warnings
(preferably in screaming bold red letters) that could not possibly be missed -
and in time to allow the reader to turn away before reaching the crucial
information.
My book reviews do not contain any significant spoilers: while it is
impossible to review a book at all without disclosing some plot elements, I have
tried not to reveal major surprises that should remain hidden until you reach
the appropriate point in the book. Occasionally I wish to comment on some of
these plot elements, but cannot do so in a review without revealing those plot
elements, and therefore up to now I have had to refrain from doing so. (If you
think disclosing any plot information is improper, and you don't want
anything at all about the plot to be revealed before you get to it in
the book, then you should not be reading a review of a book at all before you
have completely read the book itself.)
However, this page is an attempt to solve the problem I face, where I wish
to discuss plot elements that may spoil the book for those who have not yet
finished it. When I write a passage about such a plot element, I do so in a
passage of text separate from the main review, and place it on this page. The
appropriate book review page which continues here contains a link to this
spoiler page. Any pages which link to this page, and this page itself, are
plastered with warnings about plot spoilers, so that you cannot possibly miss
them - and the site map and other menu pages do not contain direct links to this
spoiler page. They list it, because I want all pages on my site to be
visible there - but the listing is not made into an active link. Therefore you
can only reach this spoiler page through a link which contains a warning of what
you are about to see - or by specifically typing in the U.R.L. for this page in
the U.R.L. box at the top of your browser. In other words, it is very difficult
to accidentally visit this page.
That way, my discussion of plot spoilers is available to you - but you have
the fully-informed choice about whether to proceed or not. Where I feel I can't
resist discussing plot spoilers, I hope this solution will be the best approach:
both providing the information, and giving readers full warning, so that they
can avoid reading material they would rather not read, at least yet.
In addition, plot spoilers for different books will be separated by much
empty space on this page, so that while you are reading one, you cannot
accidentally read another you don't intend to read. I cannot foretell how much
space on your screen the text itself will occupy, nor how many extra lines I
should put between passages to ensure that only one passage appears at a time on
your screen - but I will insert a generous number of empty lines that I think
should cover pretty well all computer configurations.
I will put a list of books covered on this page at the top, for reference,
and they will be active links: but not to the corresponding place on this page -
I don't want this page to be too easy to navigate, especially
accidentally; rather, they are links to the page which contains the original
review that this page follows on from. You can use these to go back to where
you came from.
Each spoiler part of a review which appears on this page will also carry a
link taking you back to where you just came from - or alternatively, as always,
"Backspace" will take you back there.
I've given much thought to the design of this page, so that people will
not accidentally see things they don't want to see. If anyone has any
suggestions for improving this page to that end, I would be glad to hear from
them.
Category information, hierarchical headings, links, and the like are
minimal on this page, because, unlike most of my pages, where I take the very
opposite approach (transparent, hierarchical structure, high navigability via
plentiful links), this page is not intended to be easily navigable. My
suggestion, if you choose to follow a link to this page, is to read the section
you have directly linked to, and then get out without looking any further,
except perhaps for this introductory note at the top.
I also suggest that you use "Backspace" to leave this page, rather than the
links taking you back to the page you came from - although I provide the links
because I believe in informing you how things are, then giving you freedom of
choice on how you act on the information. As you navigate the web, going
though one page after another, perhaps sometimes going back through page
sequences you've already traversed, you effectively create two stacks of web
pages: one accessed by the "Back" button on your browser (or the "Backspace"
key), and the other accessed by the "Forward" button.
If you are anything like me, when you have gone through a number of pages,
you may quite often go back and forth through the chain of pages you've created,
and thus you will transfer items from one of these two stacks to the other. By
using "Backspace" to leave this page, rather than one of the links which take
you back, you will be reducing the likelihood of this spoiler page getting into
the "Back" stack of U.R.L.s, and also increasing the likelihood that its place
in the "Forward" stack will be eliminated (which will happen if you backspace,
then activate another link in the same browser window - it destroys the former
"Forward" stack, and when you backspace after that, it starts a new stack in its
place). Thus using the "Backspace" key to quit the spoiler page minimizes your
chances of reading information on this page that you don't want to read.
I might also add that each individual passage is guarded, top and bottom,
by rather loud spoiler warnings - indeed, in the aforementioned screaming red
letters. This is because it is inevitable that this spoiler page will sooner or
later end up being referenced in search engines such as Google, and thus be
directly available. I would prefer that this not happen, but I cannot prevent
it, because of the way search engines discover new pages to list, by following
links from other web pages they already know about, which point to the new page.
In listing pages, Google (and possibly some other search engines too) not only
gives the title of the page and its U.R.L., made into active links - it also
quotes pieces of the text containing whatever words you were searching for. If
some of my spoiler warnings seem a bit excessive, this is designed to maximize
the chance that quotations from the page that end up being quoted by Google may
be preceded or followed by a spoiler warning. I can't ensure this - but I can
do my best. At least the heading as quoted by search engines will
contain the word "SPOILER" in rather loud uppercase letters.
Finally, I should add that the passages on this page are not necessarily
self-contained: they will freely refer to the original review for a book, and
they assume that you have already read that. If you choose to read a spoiler
before reading the main review, or even before reading the book itself, be it
upon your own head.
Please don't come to me complaining that I spoilt a book for you by
revealing all the crucial plot details; you are given fair warning whenever you
come anywhere near spoiler material on this web site. This is the one page
where I will allow anything to be mentioned if it comes up in
discussion - even who the murderer was in a mystery, if that is part of my
discussion. It is your problem if you deliberately ignore those
warnings.
NOTE:
Click here if you need an
explanation for the strange appearance of the e-mail address which will appear
when you click on the e-mail link, or if you don't know what you need to do to
make the e-mail address work properly.
Novels and short stories discussed on this page
Links which follow are to a page listing the author's works, or to the initial
review for items - NOT to the spoiler material further down on this
page.
NOTE: this text contains SPOILER information; it reveals
crucial plot elements of the story.
(... continued from the review of The Boy Next Door)
The plot for this book contains a surprising twist at the end which is (the
first time you read the book) completely unexpected, and yet very simple. The
"unexpected and paradoxical role" the houseboat plays in the story is that it is
simultaneously the place where Kit's friends planned to hide him from the
kidnappers and the place where the kidnappers planned to imprison him (suitably
fortified with boarded-up windows, padlocks, and so on). Because of this, at
the end of the story, the children and the kidnappers unexpectedly bump into
each other and fall headlong into the conflict which forms the final climax of
the story, which ends with the kidnappers being locked in the houseboat,
breaking free, and being chased by the police and other adults who have by now
come on the scene.
When I was younger I was interested in writing adventure stories of the
sort that Blyton wrote, and indeed this interest was inspired by Blyton's books.
But when I was doing this I was not yet a skillful writer, so I didn't write
adventure stories nearly as well as Blyton did.
Possibly I'm a better writer now, but my life has since gone in this and
that direction, and my writing of such stories has long since faded away. But,
at the time I was still interested in writing stories of this type, this device
of having one of the children hiding in the same place as where his enemy
planned to imprison him is the kind of plot twist I would have wished I had
thought of myself. And, indeed, at a time when I perhaps copied my admired
models embarrassingly closely, I could have been tempted to use it myself,
although, as it happens, I don't think I did.
No doubt I would have tried to put my own twist into the basic idea, to
make it different in some way. But it does raise in my mind the question of
just how close can you go to another writer's plot ideas without being guilty of
plagiarism. If the resemblance to an idea you borrow is general enough, an
accusation of plagiarism would be unreasonable, because, at a sufficiently
general level, it can be said that there are no new ideas at all that haven't
already been used - just variations on old ideas.
It is at a more detailed, particular level that borrowing would look more
and more like outright stealing; and the difficulty is that there is a complete
spectrum of ideas from the most general (the common property of anyone who wants
to use a concept) to the most particular (so individual that borrowing would be
theft), so it is very difficult to lay down a boundary after which borrowing is
unacceptable. No doubt different writers or critics will set this boundary of
acceptability in different places, which admittedly is not of much help to a
writer trying to decide how far he or she can go in drawing on the ideas of
others in devising a plot.
I suppose it depends on how different you can make the plot in
other ways, and maybe without considering this a definite answer cannot be
given. I would not like to say definitively that an author could never use this
particular twist of Enid Blyton's; but, at the very least, I would say that any
author who knowingly used the idea would have to be extremely careful, and would
probably be in danger of being accused of plagiarism, which would not be good
for his or her career, regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable the charge
was. In any case of doubt, it would probably be safest for an author to err on
the side of caution.
There is another unexpected plot twist in the book, although it is perhaps
less startling than the one just mentioned. The first man seen by the children
who bore a family resemblance to Kit turned out to be his father, who had not
died after all, rather than his uncle, as it appears at first to be. The reader
does not find out until the end of the story that Kit's father is alive, that he
didn't die after all; but anyone who knows Blyton's style well will probably be
aware that if a parent of one of the protagonist children has disappeared and
apparently died, then it is very likely that the parent is not dead after all,
and will put in an unexpected appearance near the end, in time for a happy
ending to things.
Very likely the parent has been in a shipwreck (most of Blyton's stories
were written at a time when people still routinely travelled by sea), or maybe a
plane crash; and, towards the end of the story, the parent will turn out to have
survived the accident, and might be stranded on a remote island, or in hospital
with memory loss, until he or she is rescued or regains memory. Whatever it is,
the important point is that the parent suffered some kind of accident or
disaster, was presumed dead, but in fact survived; and some explanation
will ultimately come to light to explain why the parent, although still alive,
did not reappear for some time.
Death appears never to happen on-stage (narrated directly) in a Blyton
novel, and even off-stage (only stated has having happened in the past, instead
of narrated) will never happen to any character close to one of the
protagonists. Death almost doesn't exist at all in Enid Blyton's world.
A flaw in the plot, noted in more general terms in the review, concerns the
second man who appeared in the book who was stated to bear a family resemblance
to Kit. This is presumably the uncle who wants to kidnap him, because he is
with men who are renting Mr. Cunningham's house, who try to keep the children
away from the houseboat; and it would not make any sense for Kit's father to be
associating with men who turn out later to be Kit's enemies. But later on it
turns out that the uncle is really the step-brother of Kit's father, not a
natural brother. As noted in the review, this would mean that the step-uncle
would have no resemblance to Kit at all, and thus the apparent resemblance of
the so-called uncle to Kit himself is a flaw in the plot.
I suppose it would be possible for him to bear a resemblance to Kit, even
though not being a blood relative, just as I might occasionally meet a stranger
who bears an uncanny resemblance to myself. But there would be no point in
introducing this element intentionally, since the man is not a blood
relative of Kit's; and, even as a red herring (which a mystery or adventure
story might deliberately introduce) it does not seem a particularly
effective or meaningful one. It seems most likely that it is a simple flaw
in the plot, perhaps arising from Blyton writing at least part of the book as if
the kidnapper were a real uncle of Kit's, but ultimately deciding to make him a
step-uncle instead, perhaps as the result of an unspoken taboo against making a
blood relative of one of the protagonists a criminal, as noted in the main
review.
This section written on Sunday, 16 June, 2002.
NOTE: The above text contains SPOILER information;
it reveals crucial plot elements of the story.
NOTE: this text contains SPOILER information; it reveals
crucial plot elements of the story.
(... continued from the review of The Right to Die)
Needless to say, the main source of suspense towards the end of the novel
is what the judge decides with regard to the application for guardianship and
permission to disconnect the respirator.
The judge admits that this has been one of the most difficult decisions he
has ever been required to make, and that it is about as marginal as it can be;
but he takes the conservative line and denies the application, citing fairly
typical anti-euthanasia arguments about the right to life and the issue of
consent. Evidence was given that Mary Beth had, prior to her coma, expressed
her horror of ever being dependent on any kind of machine for living; but the
judge did not put as much strength on this evidence as her family had hoped,
possibly because it was considered only hearsay evidence, which can often be
inadmissible as evidence in a court of law.
Mary Beth's mother is extremely upset at the decision, and feels that Mary
Beth's soul is in torment from her living death, and that going through lengthy
appeal processes would merely prolong her agony; so the dramatic, but not
entirely surprising, result of the judge's decision is that Mary Beth's mother
goes quietly into her daughter's room and pulls the plug herself, then creeps
away quietly before her action is discovered by the medical staff.
The novel ends there, with the nurses crying in horror upon discovering
that Mary Beth has died; but obviously a lot is going to happen as a result of
this - such as the probable murder trial Mary Beth's mother would face as an
obvious suspect, in spite of having successfully left the hospital undetected,
and also the probable public furore that would surround this - and I feel the
story is not really complete because of this. There would certainly be
potential for more chapters here, or perhaps a sequel, and, if one appeared, I
would read it with interest. Yet I feel it might simply continue to explore
the same issues, and not deal with other aspects of euthanasia (such as active
euthanasia), simply because it would still all be about the same case and the
same issues.
However, such a sequel seems extremely unlikely, nearly 3 decades later.
This section written on Saturday, 12 July, 2003;
last modified on Sunday, 13 July, 2003.
NOTE: The above text contains SPOILER information;
it reveals crucial plot elements of the story.
Mendal W. JOHNSON: Let's Go Play at the Adams' (1974)
NOTE: this text contains SPOILER information; it reveals
crucial plot elements of the story.
(... continued from the review of Let's Go Play at
the Adams')
Anyone who has read Let's Go Play at the Adams' will of course know
about the final, shocking torture scene, and that Barbara dies as a result of
this. I do not mention this in my review for this book, since it definitely
gives away crucial things about the plot that should not be given away
prematurely to those who have not completed their reading of the novel. But the
extremely disturbing effect of the novel, although manifest throughout the
novel, is perhaps at its most intense in these final pages of the novel.
Without a doubt, the novel is expertly paced, so that the screw tightens
inexorably throughout the book: slowly, at first, so that, to begin with,
Barbara's bondage appears little more than a practical joke; then things get
more serious - gradually, to begin with; but, in those final chapters, the
progress of events becomes cataclysmic. And you can sense impending doom before
it actually happens, like clouds gathering in a thunder-storm. And the doom is
probably even worse than most readers will be expecting, even though, towards
the final chapters, they are probably tensed up in the guts, expecting the worst
their imagination can conjure up.
Perhaps Barbara Miller's final night tied up alone in the tenant house is
the point where it finally sinks in to her, and to the reader, that drastic and
irreversible things are going to happen. She is hog-tied (hands behind back,
knees bent back, and ankles connected to wrists) in a mass of hopelessly
inescapable ropes, helpless to do anything but think about what might lie in
store for her. The increasingly extreme things that Freedom Five have done to
Barbara have by now reached the point where they would face lengthy, maybe
life-long, prison terms if caught (or alternatively, indefinite detention in a
psychiatric hospital) - even if they freed her now and did nothing more to hurt
her. Barbara knows this, and is for this reason quite certain that Freedom Five
intend to murder her - and she has a fair idea that the method they use will be
extremely nasty, too. This of course intensifies her fear greatly, in contrast
to earlier, when she thought her bondage was little more than an extreme game or
joke, and that Freedom Five might free her when they tired of it.
To me, that final night is perhaps the crucial point where things sink
irreversibly into complete hopelessness - and I can assure you that, when I
first read that, I was perhaps more fearful for what I felt sure lay ahead than
when reading any other book in my whole life. (Of course I didn't know the
details of what lay ahead, but I knew it would be awful beyond
imagining - and my expectation was not in vain.)
Amongst the most chilling scenes I've ever read in any fiction occur during
that final, hopeless night, when, one at a time, a couple of Freedom Five
members come and visit Barbara, and talk with her about what is happening,
almost as if it were a deep philosophical question. Diana seems to regard it as
a game in which there are winners and there are losers, and sees it as a grand
metaphor for the meaning of life itself, and reasons away Barbara's pathetic
pleas for freedom, or at least for a quick and painless death. She scoffs at
this, saying that "you're not going to get out of it just by sniffing a funny
bottle" (referring to the possibility of Barbara being gassed to death in some
way).
Barbara is carried downstairs the next morning and tied spreadeagled to a
farm gate, where she suffers tortures that would have put the Inquisition to
shame, in spite of the gut-churning things that it did to so-called heretics.
The children apply a hot poker to her in various places on her body (all the
worst places your imagination might think up), and Paul in particular (perhaps
the sickest and most twisted member of Freedom Five) seems to see almost a
mystical significance in burning deep into the soles of her feet, where he
imagines that one's innermost soul truly resides. So caught up in their frenzy
are they that they continue torturing Barbara, seemingly not having noticed just
yet that she has already died.
Then there is the final chapter of the book, an epilogue which sketches out
the aftermath of this horrid affair, and speculates on the possible future
effects these events will have on the children. Freedom Five had planned well
and had a cover story which framed an itinerant fruit picker who was already
dead so that he could not deny their account of things. (He was shot dead by
Freedom Five supposedly when they found him torturing Barbara with the poker.)
The police come and duly interview the children, although Paul lapses into such
spastic fear that the questioning is called off, supposedly because of the
damaging effect such interrogation would have on his delicate and tortured
psyche.
So the truth never comes out, and the children get away with their terrible
crimes, and this seems to me to be one of the things that contributes greatly to
the disturbing effect of this book. The reader is longing for justice
to be done at last (and justice and retribution are by now indistinguishable, so
tightly has the emotional screw been turned by the author); but justice is
denied for ever - just as it is often in real life.
The last pages of the novel speculate in a gloomily lyrical way on the
possible effects on the children of these deeds the memory of which they must
live with for the rest of their lives - but, other than that, there is no more
resolution. For me at least, the disturbing effect of this book when I first
read it haunted me oppressively for days, and possibly still lingered for a week
or two to some degree. I cannot recall any novel that has had such a powerful
effect on me.
I might like to expand on these remarks further once I've looked at the
book again (which I have not read for some years now), because its uncommonly
disturbing effects seem to intrigue me (partly just from the viewpoint of the
writing skill involved), and analysis of how the book achieves its effects might
almost constitute a handbook of how to write horror fiction.
This section written on Thursday, 13 December, 2001.
NOTE: The above text contains SPOILER information;
it reveals crucial plot elements of the story.
The shocking things that take place in the back room are heaped onto you
layer by layer, like a pile-driver, in the final pages of the story, in one of
the most shocking scenes I think I have ever read in any fiction. Perhaps only
certain scenes in Richard Laymon's fiction are comparable.
The first is that you find out that it is babies - human infants -
who are fighting in the ring, all decked out in fish-like scales, and weapons
such as series of needles or unicorn-like horns. They are unloaded from boxes
by women who appear to be their mothers - or sometimes just taken from
them; at the end, the babies, dead or alive, are handed back to the sometimes
hysterical women. And people are gambling on these fights, just like
they were with the cocks and pit bull terriers. And the people in the audience
here, in the narrator's words, make the ones out front look like Peter Pan.
This is bad enough - but there's more to follow. The babies are unusually
small: one of them appears to have a lizard-like tail, and another fish-like
gills. They are foetuses, aborted well before term, sometimes as early
as three months after conception, and they survived the abortion. Since then,
they have been specially trained by unspecified means to fight each other: the
training apparently develops in them both the mental capacity to act
purposefully (deliberately attack each other, and so on), and the physical
coordination it would take to do this - which I would assume a foetus simply
would not naturally have at that stage.
It's a powerful image of evil, and, although sensational fiction (science
fiction, horror fiction, and the like) is one of my vices (if you want to so
term it), this story really made me wonder if it is an unhealthy interest, or
taken to excess - it seems really beyond the pale in some deep, fundamental
sense. No doubt part of the author's skill is to be able to create such strong
feeling in his work; there must be powerful emotional or symbolic resonances in
a story, perhaps not perceptible consciously, to give rise to such
feelings. And no doubt this is one of Little's strengths as a writer, and his
work is probably best approached from this kind of perspective - getting into
the head-space of such powerful imagery, rather than thinking about the logic
(or lack of logic) of it all.
But I tend to be a logical, literal kind of person, and my mind always asks
questions like "Why did this happen?", or "How did it happen?", or "Surely
that's impossible for such-and-such a reason?" And if you start asking
questions like this about Little's work, it tends to fall apart a little: he
often writes of incidents which are utterly impossible as far as we know in the
real world, and does not even make an attempt to provide a rationale. The
result is that a plot summary of one of his stories tends to sound a bit
ridiculous - but if you actually read the story, it is far more
convincing than you would expect, or even think possible. But for me at least,
the logical questions in this story were not completely kept at bay.
For instance, I fairly quickly found myself objecting: "Hey, just a minute
there: a three-month foetus has neither the brain power to fight purposefully,
nor the physical coordination to move around like a miniature adult. Why, it
probably can't even breathe unassisted. And even if it could
fight like it does, why does it do it? What motivation do these foetuses have
to fight and kill each other like that?" Well, the vague answer is that they
were trained to do all that, like dogs are trained to fight; and
perhaps drugs or genetic manipulation administered soon after conception
physically enabled the foetuses to do the necessary things (I surmised, since
this was not even mentioned). So I was left to assume that they must have been
somehow brainwashed so that they had no real will-power, and just had to do it,
and were somehow enabled physically to do it. Perhaps special drugs or
psychological training methods were used to make the impossible possible. But
who knows?: no further explanation was forthcoming, and personally I would have
liked a bit more. It did somewhat spoil the otherwise shattering power of this
story. Perhaps that's my problem, though; not the story's.
Some writers who write of impossible events attempt to give a supernatural
rationale, and this can be an effective technique if done well: for instance by
someone such as Dean Koontz or Graham Masterton. Koontz in particular is a
virtuosic master of this - for stunning examples, see Lightning, The
House of Thunder, and Sole Survivor - totally satisfying and
convincing explanations for the most bizarre of happenings. Sometimes Koontz's
explanations are not even supernatural in any way, but simply hinge on known
science or science that can be extrapolated without too much of a leap of
credibility - and yet they are totally convincing, and explain everything very
plausibly.
But it's not Little's way. He rarely explains anything, either in
supernatural or scientific terms, but simply presents his stories on a
take-it-or-leave-it basis, and leaves you to make what you will of it. His
universe seems to be an inherently mysterious one in which things just happen,
for no discernible reason, and, for all you can tell, there might be no reason
at all for certain happenings, even in principle - they just happen.
I could perhaps make one little nit-pick concerning "The Backroom",
covering a feature common to the other stories in this collection - namely a
degree of inconclusiveness at the end of the story. To explain it, a little
plot detail needs to be given first.
The story is told in the first person; and how the narrator and his friend
Don end up going to a cockfight at all is that Don pleads with him to go to a
cockfight with him, because he has to place a bet for Phillip Esteban, to whom
he owes a gambling debt, but who would cancel the debt if Don went to the fight,
apparently because Phillip got a percentage of the fees charged at the door.
Very reluctantly the narrator gives in, and off they go. (It's not quite clear
why Don is so insistent that the narrator go with him.)
The narrator and Don leave the scene, sickened to the depth of their souls;
neither of them appear to have known that human foetuses were involved until
they actually saw it for themselves, and thought it would be just an ordinary
cockfight. Out in the street, they meet Phillip. Don asks him why he couldn't
have gone and placed the bet himself, instead of having Don do it for him, and
Phillip indicates that the ethics (!!) of this grubby business forbade him from
betting on the fight himself, because he himself was the trainer of Pedro, the
foetus who won - that was how Phillip knew Pedro would win. That's the first
point about this ending that I don't understand. Asked how he got involved in
this horrible business, Phillip reveals that Pedro was (or would have been, if
he had been born normally) Phillip's brother - this is why he had no choice but
to get involved in the whole business.
This revelation comes at the very end of the story, almost as if it were
the crux of the story - but I quite fail to see the point of it. So what if
Pedro was his brother? - that surely can't mean a lot in the face of the horror
of the overall situation as it has been revealed over the previous few pages.
If it adds special significance to the situation, I quite fail to see it. If it
doesn't, it seems a superfluous addition to the story. Of course, all this
detail may well point to a whole strand of undercurrents in the story which I
just failed to perceive, to which this final development is relevant.
However, this is a rather trivial point, and I would say this story strikes
me as a lot less inconclusive than every other story in this collection,
and the only one that seems to have a structure or sequence of some sort, rather
than being a dream-like sequence of random events.
This section written on Monday, 24 September, 2001.
NOTE: The above text contains SPOILER information;
it reveals crucial plot elements of the story.
NOTE: this text contains SPOILER information; it reveals
crucial plot elements of the story.
(... continued from the review of Shipwreck)
The end of this novel is of course inevitable, and it seems obvious right
from the first pages that the novel must end with Tansis's death.
However, the fact that most readers should be able to anticipate the ending
from early in the book does not in the least reduce its impact when it comes. It
is one of the most stunning endings to a novel I've ever read: heartbreaking, yet
quite moving and uplifting, and led up to with great passion and intensity by
episodes in which Tansis's health is steadily declining owing to not being
properly adapted to the planet's ecology.
After all this build-up, the final sentence of the novel (which I still
know from memory, close to verbatim) is, in spite of its simplicity, perhaps one
of the most powerful sentences I've ever read in a novel: "And there, on the
rock at the edge of the sea, he died." I think I came unexpectedly close to
crying the very first time I read this sentence perhaps 25 years ago.
This section moved here from the main book review on Friday, 9 August, 2002.
NOTE: The above text contains SPOILER information;
it reveals crucial plot elements of the story.
Mel LYLE: The Mystery of the Flying Skeleton (1964)
NOTE: this text contains SPOILER information; it reveals
crucial plot elements of the story.
(... continued from the review of The Mystery of the Flying Skeleton
)
The way in which the hurricane affects the outcome of the plot is that
Disbareaux's half-constructed motel is completely flattened by it, while Frank
Kelly's motel is left intact. And the reason for this, it is surmised (but
never stated outright), was that Disbareaux had had a "deal" with the building
inspector, and he had not followed the building code which required that blocks
be reinforced with steel columns. In other words, he was in such a hurry to
complete his motel in time for the tourist season that he bribed the inspector
to let him take a few short-cuts - and this had made his motel more vulnerable
to hurricane damage than it would otherwise have been. This is never actually
proved in the book, but Jack surmises it after Frank Kelly, looking at the
wreckage of Disbareaux's motel, is puzzled at how badly it was damaged by the
hurricane (completely), while his own property is undamaged. (And, as the
hurricane raged, and the motel was being destroyed, the papier-maché mastodon
already erected over its entrance was torn free of its moorings, and flung away
by the wind, leaving its frame - which in turn was also broken off and blown
away. This was the "flying skeleton" of the book's title - a pretty lame
justification for a book title, if you ask me. Still, at least two other titles
in the series are just as dubious: an ocean can't literally burn, as one title
implies, and a skyscraper is not literally haunted by ghosts, although it is
metaphorically haunted in the sense of plagued by trouble and intrigue.)
Because Disbareaux is portrayed as rather unpleasant and unscrupulous,
there's a bit of a feeling that he deserves what he got from the hurricane, a
sense of poetic justice (undone by the very same illegitimate tactics he had
hoped to use to squash Kelly's business).
But it is characteristic of the vagueness of the Power Boys books generally
that one never finds out any detail about what happened in the aftermath of all
this. Was Disbareaux charged with any breaches of the building code? Or did he
just go somewhere else and continue business? Not a word is said about this.
At any rate, Frank Kelly opines that Disbareaux will not rebuild his motel on
the same site: even if he wanted to, it was unlikely (according to Kelly) that
he would be able to get the finance now, after all that had happened.
So what had happened? Surely being flattened by a hurricane was just an
act of God, and no-one's fault, and Disbareaux could start again? Well, it
certainly wouldn't look good if it was revealed that he had not only breached
the building code, but had also bribed a building inspector to let him get away
with this. This would probably also be illegal, as well as the building-code
breach itself - and, even if he were never charged with anything (which he
didn't appear to be), then at the very least he would not be entrusted with
finance for rebuilding.
That wasn't all: there was the matter of the dinosaur bones, also, which
always seemed a bit shady right from the beginning. And this is where Malcolm
Adams's disappearance ties in. Adams's son-in-law ran a zoo nearby, and Adams,
who had dug up the dinosaur bones on his farm some distance away had given them
to the son-in-law for use as an exhibit. But the son-in-law was offering to let
Disbareaux use them for his publicity stunt, which involved secretly burying the
bones on the motel construction site, then "discovering" them in a blaze of
publicity. This wouldn't look good, either, to any potential financiers for
rebuilding. So Frank Kelly was probably right that Disbareaux would not be able
to rebuild, in that location at least. Mr. Adams disapproved of this deal
between his son-in-law and Disbareaux, and threatened to expose it, and the two
responded by abducting him and leaving him on a mangrove island for a while so
he couldn't reveal anything until it didn't matter anyway.
And this illustrates yet more vagueness: no-one appears to be charged with
any offences in this book, even though several probably illegal acts, including
abduction, have been committed. Not a word more is said about it, and it
contributes to the overall vague effect of the story.
Not to mention that one would have to wonder if abducting Adams was totally
irrational, in that he would know at least one of his abductors (his own
son-in-law), and the motivation for this seems a bit obvious. In Disbareaux's
position (even if I were completely ruthless) I would not want to be involved
with such an abduction - it could be exposed only too easily. Still - I guess
there are quite rash, irrational criminals, who only think about their actions
afterwards, if at all. But when characters in a book of this sort act
irrationally, you feel the author hasn't quite done the right thing by readers,
by planning the plot carefully enough.
So the upshot of all this is that Kelly's motel is now safe - and this has
been the main issue at stake throughout the book. So it is a happy ending (as
of course all such adventure stories feature), although the effect of it is
diluted rather by its vagueness and the failure by the author to follow up
certain points further.
This section written on Monday, 10 February, 2003.
NOTE: The above text contains SPOILER information;
it reveals crucial plot elements of the story.