Post by mdorman

I guess this falls in the same basic genre as Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" novels, though I'm not 100% certain what that genre is: Crime Fiction? Thriller? Vigilantism?

Regardless, having plowed through Child's oeuvre last year---and it being the only real example of the genre I've read---I cannot help but make comparisons between Aud Torvingen and Jack Reacher.

Both have that air of almost-super-human competence coupled with extraordinary physical conditioning and a capacity to absorb punishment. Both have a companionable attitude toward violence. Both are situated so that there are few long-lasting consequences to their actions; Reacher by being rootless and drifting, Torvingen by being independently wealthy.

The difference, I would say, is that as would seem to befit a male character in this category, Reacher is effectively amoral. He is less a character than a force of nature. He does what he does, with little consideration for other human beings, positive or negative---if he aids someone it is because it pleases him, not because of any particular notion of right or wrong.

Torvingen, on the other hand, gets involved. Things become personal. Is it a cliche that a woman would become attached? Perhaps---I guess it will depend on how it ramifies out through the two following novels whether it ends up seeming necessary.

The prose is generally well done, but it is a first-person narrative, and there are very few authors who can pull off such a thing without annoying me at some point or other---and Griffith isn't one of those, at least not in this book. If absolutely nothing else the sex in the novel---whether necessary or not---reads just as eye-rollingly overdone as any Reacher novel: it is, almost by definition, somewhere the narrator inevitably ends up telling rather than showing. I don't know what's going on in your head when you're having sex, but I hope for your sake it's not narrative.

I guess, in the end, it was good enough that I'll stick around for the next two, to see where it goes, but if I were a less compulsive reader, I might just say this was enough.