Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (20 page)

The Survivors' Club

by Lisa Gardner

Bantam, 368 pages, hardback, 2002

Jillian, Carol and Meg, although all beautiful, are three very different women – the first is forceful and dominant, the second is a bit of an emotional wreck, and the third is young and seemingly naive – but all share one thing in common: they have all survived an attack by the murderous College Hill Rapist. Together they formed the Survivors' Club and bullied the Rhode Island cops into intensifying the hunt for the rapist, with the result that Eddie Como has been arrested and charged with the crimes on the basis of a DNA match. As he arrives for the first day of his trial, however, Como is assassinated by a professional hit man who is himself promptly killed by a car bomb.

Onto this turbulent scene comes state cop Roan Griffin, who is recovering from traumas of his own: he had a breakdown after, in quick succession, his wife died of cancer and a serial child-rapist and -killer he'd been hunting, David Price, proved to be the seemingly friendly guy next door. As he probes the two new killings Griffin becomes emotionally involved with the three members of the Survivors' Club, each in different ways, and with their families. Matters become rapidly more complex when the College Hill Rapist strikes again, once more leaving sperm traces whose DNA matches that of the dead Como. As Griffin delves he discovers that nothing – about the crimes or about the Survivors – is as it has hitherto seemed ...

This is an extremely impressive mystery-thriller, enhanced by generally excellent characterization and sense of mood. Some aspects are of course predictable through the nature of the genre: Como was innocent, Griffin and Jillian are destined for each other, and so on. But these conventions serve to satisfy our expectations – which they do admirably – and are anyway more than compensated for by countless delightfully unexpected twists and turns of the plot. What's additionally pleasing is that Gardner isn't afraid to be pretty tough with the reader at times, unflinchingly presenting the sheer nastiness of violent rape; there's also a somewhat muted subtext about capital punishment.

A couple of cavils, though. First, the mechanism whereby those DNA matches have been forged by the perpetrators seems very improbable. It may well be theoretically possible, but it seems so byzantine as to create a plausibility gap that even as good a writer as Gardner cannot bridge. Second, toward the end events enter a phase of
Silence of the Lambs
-like melodrama; that this should happen is inevitable as a consequence of the preceding plot – it's not gratuitous stuff – but again it makes the reader's happy suspension of disbelief difficult to maintain.

These are, though, surprisingly minor criticisms when you're actually reading the book; it's only afterwards that they surface as discontents. All the rest of the tale-telling is so very good that you're prepared to forgive Gardner just about any lapse as you feverishly turn the pages ...

—Crescent Blues

Science Good, Bad and Bogus

by Martin Gardner

Prometheus, 412 pages, paperback, 1989

Martin Gardner's book
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
(1957; an expanded version of his 1952 book
Fads and Fallacies
) is one of those rare books that I would recommend should be in the library of every intelligent human being. Dated much of it might be, but as an example of how pseudoscience withers under the spotlight of rational thought it is almost incomparable: it serves as a source of great entertainment but also as a warning to each and every one of us that we should examine closely our received ideas as well as some of our own dottier notions.

Science Good, Bad and Bogus
is, in a way, Gardner's very much later companion volume to that seminal work, and like it is drawn from essays written over the years. It's a much fatter book, and one's tempted to say that this is largely because of the amount of repetition in it; whereas in
Fads
he went to a certain amount of trouble to ensure the book was indeed an integral book rather than merely a retrospective, here he ... well, basically, he didn't bother.

This actually does the compilation a great disservice. One can forgive anyone for harping on about their
bêtes noires
– Gardner's prime ones are Immanuel Velikovsky and Uri Geller – but constant repetition of that harping-on becomes at first merely tedious and then as maddening as being asked to watch a dead horse being flogged and required to applaud each and every time.

His subject matter is of course a mixture of pseudoscience and the supernatural/psychic; in effect the supernatural/psychic becomes here a subgenre of pseudoscience, in that he approaches psychic claims from the viewpoint of experimental science. Thus, for example, while it is patent that he regards Geller as a charlatan-conjurer, he is more concerned with the deeply flawed investigations of Geller's claims by pseudoscientists and established scientists alike than with the full details of the trickery. This is actually a much more rewarding approach than the obvious one – attacking Geller's claims directly – and profoundly more educational. A recurring theme, and one that could well be carried over into our evaluations of more orthodox science, is that expertise and indeed genius in one sphere of human understanding should not be taken as any qualification at all for pronouncements in another. To continue with Geller as our example, we have much here on how a fine mathematician, John Taylor, was hopelessly deluded when he came to examine the supposed phenomenon of spoon-bending – not just by Geller but by a horde of gleefully cheating kids.

About half the essays in
Science Good, Bad and Bogus
are extended book reviews, and in many ways these are even more revealing than the others. While a good number of the books he eviscerates have vanished into obscurity, all are, of course, still floating around in libraries and second-hand bookshops, and are thus continuing to delude the unwary. After each review, as per the other essays, Gardner includes a postscript, updating his comments as necessary and often citing the outraged letters received in the wake of the item's original publication. Again, these postscripts are especially rewarding in the case of the book reviews, for many of the authors have chosen to defend their work
in extenso
... and sometimes they make a reasonably good fist of it, reminding us that we should be just as sceptical about sceptics like Gardner as about anyone else.

This note leads to another mild criticism of the book. While my knowledge of the field is far less extensive than Gardner's, every now and then I had the feeling that perhaps an occasional baby was being flushed away with the bathwater. This sense was brought into sharp focus when I came across Gardner's assault on a famous joke of John Gribbin's. In Gribbin's clearly labelled exercise in wild speculation,
White Holes
(1977), he discusses tachyons, hypothetical faster-than-light particles which the mathematics insist would have to "travel backwards in time" (i.e., go the "wrong way" along time's arrow). In a spirit of self-mockery concerning all the quite serious (if, to repeat, wild) speculation that fills the book, Gribbin advanced the deliberately spurious theory that Gellerite spoon-bending might be caused by the audience's astonishment on sight of a spoon being bent releasing a burst of tachyons; said tachyons would then "travel backwards in time" to bend the spoon. It's not one of the world's
greatest
jokes, but it's pretty obviously a joke.

Gardner obviously didn't spot that, instead taking it as an example of the kind of speculation that he disliked in the rest of Gribbin's book (and in Gribbin's and Stephen Plagemann's earlier, definitely attackable book
The Jupiter Effect
). In the postscript to the review he cites Gribbin's remarkably friendly follow-up letter pointing out gently that Gardner had, well, missed the joke. Gardner's response to this letter is astonishing, and does not burnish his reputation much; it's very much a huffy "well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" diatribe. Gardner then goes on to attack a
different
Gribbin book,
Timewarps
(1979), as if its many flaws somehow bolstered Gardner's floundering argument that he hadn't, for once, been hoist by his own hyper-sceptical petard.

I've gone on at length about this single example not because it's desperately important in itself but because it symptomatizes the suspicion that Gardner can become just as obsessively tunnel-visioned in the zeal to prove his case as any pseudoscientist blinded by conviction to any contrary evidence.

Elsewhere among the many outraged letters quoted in these postscripts we see frequent examples of his correspondents' inability to understand the nature of science. For example, in the case of one telepathy experiment Gardner points out that it would have been possible for a confederate to have seen how the Zener cards were turning by standing on a chair in a corridor outside the experimenter's room and watching through a fanlight. Now, Gardner's point was not that this
did
happen but that it
could have
– and the very fact that it could have, or that something like it could have, destroys the validity of the supposedly scientific experiment. That is, it is not
proof
that there was no telepathy involved; it merely shows that the experiment, likewise, has not proved that there was, despite the experimenters' claims. This sort of refinement is clearly over the heads of many of those who wrote to complain about Gardner's various conclusions.

All of this said,
Science Good, Bad and Bogus
is, overall, an extremely valuable, interesting and entertaining compilation, and can be thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in the stranger workings of the human mind and in the effectiveness of rational, analytic thought as a tool for understanding the grab-bag of marvels that is the universe around us.

—Infinity Plus

Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

Morrow, 304 pages, hardback, 2002

Bartholomew Gill (real name Mark McGarrity) died in summer 2002 and so this posthumous novel is presumably the last in his popular sequence about Dublin cop Peter McGarr – unless, perhaps, McGarrity left further unpublished manuscripts, or unless the publisher commissions another author to continue the series.

The Book of Kells and a couple others are stolen from Trinity College, Dublin, the thieves leaving behind a gruesomely murdered security chief. Initially responsibility is laid at the feet of an obscure pro-Celtic-Golden-Age-That-Never-Was secret society, the New Druids, a suspicion reinforced by receipt of video tapes, seemingly from the society, demanding ransom.

But is it all really so simple? McGarr, recovering from two years of widowerhood, doubts it even while falling for the sensual lures of one of the key witnesses, Kara. He doubts it even more as Chicago-gangster-style violence erupts on the Dublin streets, as the body count of gorily murdered tangential characters mounts, as he goes back for a further bout of uninhibited passion with the sophisticated Kara, whom he can hardly credit would be interested in a gnarly old street cop like himself, as ...

This last novel in the series was in fact my first – alas, most probably
my
last, too. It's entertaining, but in a rather superficial way; if there are hidden depths to the tale and its recounting then I missed them. And, by about a quarter of the way through, credulity begins to be stretched beyond breaking point. No.
I
can't believe either that Kara would throw herself wantonly at McGarr; even less can I believe that her behaviour wouldn't make him smell a very large rat. I can't believe Dubliners would be so blasé about the sudden epidemic of shoot-ups in their city, or about the grandiosely staged serial murders; to be true, the people are shown to be glued to the TV news, but there's no sense that, say, they're taking such precautions as staying indoors a lot. I didn't much believe in any of the characters, from the Irish taoiseach and McGarr's dimwit publicity-seeking rival superintendent on down – with the exception of McGarr himself, his immediately family and a muckraking journalist, who are well handled. And, while it's many a year since last I was in that city, I didn't even find myself believing in the Dublin setting.

A further annoyance: the publisher presumably felt so reverential toward its deceased author's sacrosanct words that numerous hasty first-draft clumsinesses are evident: "The others were staring at him, one man even having rose from his seat to get a better look"; "McGarr knew other people who had suffered losses as great as he is but whose hobbies had given them succour and solace"; and so on

I suspect Gill fans will enjoy this novel as the completion of the saga. For the rest of us, this is a book to be borrowed from the library as a way of passing a no more than moderately enjoyable evening.

—Crescent Blues

Vaporetto 13

by Robert Girardi

Sceptre, 197 pages, paperback, 1998

There are too many supernatural novels about Venice, and almost all of them conform to the same template. An American or a Brit who works in one of the professions – teaching and finance are particularly popular – has recently suffered either a bereavement or the bustup of an amatory relationship, and they go to Venice, either for a therapeutic holiday or for professional reasons. There they discover the mystical magic of the damp and squalid city, get lost a few times while walking insomniac among its bridges and back alleys, and encounter the supernatural. If they are female, they are likely (although this is far from inevitable) to meet a staunch and reliable male who helps them through the various assaults mounted by the spirit world, and at the end either sail off into the sunset with them or say a wistful and moist-eyed farewell along the lines of: "I love you forever and the sex was grrreat, but It Was Not To Be." If they're male, it's more likely the fascinating but highly enigmatic woman whom they meet while walking insomniac among those bridges and back alleys and with whom they have that grrreat sex doesn't support them against the spirits but actually
is
a ghost made flesh.

Robert Girardi's Venice novel falls into the latter category. It's short – little more than a longish novella – and it's generally very nicely written, but it has absolutely nothing new to say. The ghost woman is encountered about ten pages after you've started impatiently wondering when she's going to appear, and the only surprise about the denouement is the fact that Girardi believes the revelation that the woman is a ghost is going to surprise you. After that, in an epilogue, his hero (Jack Squire, touchingly called Jack Spire in the blurb, presumably by the same person who in the prelims describes good reviews of Girardi's previous novels as "paise") seeks pastoral advice from his priest, who guides him as follows:

And before you can come to mass, you'll need to come to confession ... Because if, as you say, you pursued sexual relations with that Venetian woman outside the sanctity of marriage, it's still adultery plain and simple, even if she was dead when you did it.

There are too many supernatural novels about Venice, and almost all of them conform to the same template. This is one of them.

—Samhain