Will Someone Kindly Call 9-1-1? Please?
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Author: Kathryn Neville
Title: The Fire Genre: ?? Once every decade or two, a book comes along that changes the way readers look at the modern novel; a book that instantly rewrites the bestselling paradigm. When that happens, everywhere you look, people are carrying the book; people are chattering about it around the water cooler; folks are recommending this "groundbreaking new work" to their friends and book clubs. Whether we like the books or not, we can probably remember when we first heard of John Grisham's The Firm, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, or Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code; like people remember what they were doing when they learned that Elvis had died. Katherine Neville's The Fire is definitely, unequivocally, not that book. It's not even close. It's not even in the same library as that book. Right about here, you probably expect a plot summary. The problem, however, is that after struggling through the 440-some pages of The Fire, I still have no earthly idea what this book is about. It seems - seems, mind you - to have something to do with chess and a thousand-year-old chess set endowed with some sort of magical powers - or maybe it doesn't have magical powers; that point (like much of Neville's opus) remains unclear. The mad Sufi alchemist who created this magical or maybe unmagical but expensive chess set (which somehow became named "The Montglane Service" - a pretty un-Sufi name, if you ask me) in the court of a crazed Persian sultan back in the aught-nines or whenever either imbued the board and the thirty-two pieces with magical powers or he didn't, I'm not real clear on that point; and he either concealed a great secret in the board or he didn't: I'm still not certain - and I sure as hell don't know what the great secret is - maybe it's that elixir they were nattering about near the end? And to make matters more... ummm... complex? confusing? tedious? The novel has "a Game afoot" involving real-life people who correspond to the various chess pieces, like... tada! the Black Queen! Of course, just what that Game might be and what the aitch-e-double-hockey-sticks it has to do with that damned chess set still remains a mystery to me. If it's supposed to be a chess Game played out in real life, I really have to wonder why the living representations of those chess pieces spend the whole book not doing a thing! What I am reasonably certain about is that in modern times, a former child chess prodigy turned scullery maid in a Basque restaurant (a what kind of restaurant?), is sort of,you know, like the central character. Alexandra Solarin is (or maybe isn't,or maybe thinks she is but isn't) the Black Queen or maybe the Black Queen's daughter; maybe even the White Queen. Her father was murdered a decade ago (lucky him, he doesn't have to read this crap) - or maybe he wasn't - and maybe he was killed by the Black Queen (or the other Black Queen, there seems to be two of 'em) and maybe he wasn't. What's really bizarre is that there are 32 pieces on a chess board, but for some reason only three of them are involved in this Game (Always With A Capital G) of apparently earth-shaking importance (for reasons that are never explained). So, what happened to all the other pieces; the bishops, the knights, the pawns... Hey, wait a second: we was rooked! Oh, yeah, and apparently this all happened (at least) once before at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and lo, and behold, all manner of interesting people were players in the previous "Game(s)"; though not necessarily "pieces," since we still never "meet" anyone other than the Black and White Queens and the White King. But hey, that's not a plot summary; 'cause you can't summarize what's not there... Some say that author Katherine Neville took the world by storm with her 1998 novel, The Eight, allegedly beating Dan Brown to the punch with the whole "medieval connection and puzzle" genre. I don't know - I didn't read it (and would have to be waterboarded before I would). She reprises her "puzzle" bits for The Fire, though they're frankly quite lackluster and dull; but even worse are those every-third-chapter flashbacks to the early nineteenth century. That's where Neville parades the famous and the powerful through her pages like stars treading the red carpet at the Oscars. There's Jefferson, Talleyrand, Byron, Shelley, Dumas... the list is well-nigh endless (I'm sure I missed several while skimming these useless interludes). Oh, and the characters? Kauri, Charlot, Haidée? are they named after Neville's daughters Corrie, Charlotte, and Heidi? We may never know... we really don't care, either.
Anyone remember the nineties television version of "The Highlander"("I am Duncan McLeod of the clan McLeod...")? Remember when Richie turned out to be immortal? Remember wondering how the heck that happened? Well, the entire plot of The Fire is chock full of "hey, wait a minute: how did thathappen?" moments. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief, but only so far: after which I resent being jerked around. I passed that particular watershed point at about page 125... The novel is not only tedious, plotless. and predictable (anyone with a brain knew that the heroine and the handsome young grand master would be doing the horizontal bop by the end of the book), but it's also badly researched and poorly edited. For one thing, there isn't a single mountain in Colorado "three miles high," much less one on the Colorado Plateau (which, by the way, is a lotlower in elevation than 14,000 feet. And what idiot would fly a plane from DC to Jackson Hole by way of Pierre, passing over the Black Hills along the way (it'd be a lot easier to follow I-80 and avoid the mountains entirely). Neville also needs to learn what "namesake" means, how to spell "semaphore," and that Aleuts don't have the firebird in their mythology. Sheesh. You know how when you're reading a thriller you start reading faster and faster as you approach the end? That's what happened to me with The Fire, except my pace was picking up in pure anticipation of being able to put this book down for the last time. It's plotless, it makes no sense whatsoever, and it is boring enough to make my head hurt. Take my advice: even if you thought Neville's The Eight was great literature, give The Fire a wide, wide berth: you'll thank me. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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