Bitter, bitter me
12/11/08 21:05 Filed in: Mysteries
Reading Friend of the Devil was a tough slog. Truth be told, the book was boring. I didn't care about the victims; I didn't care about the "coppers". I actually stopped reading the book several times and let it sit for several days. The last time I did that was with just 60 pages left. That's right — in the middle of the rising action, I put the book down. And left it down. I finally finished it only because I'm funny that way. And I felt I had to finish it before I could move on to something new.
One of my major beefs is that Friend of the Devil spends as much time on the personal lives of the three major police investigators (Banks, Annie and Winsome — someone please explain to me why Robinson calls everyone by their last names except Annie?) as it does on the mystery itself. Not having read Robinson's previous 16 novels, I came into this one cold, with no prior history with his characters. I did not know them nor did I care about them. And this book is simply not good enough to stand on its own.
So when Annie obsesses about a one-night stand she's had with a young lad and about her own battles with the bottle, I yawn and want to flip ahead. While Winsome spends pages struggling with her recently discovered prudish streak, I battle the urge to take up knitting instead. And when Inspector Banks finds love in the final 100 pages and spends much of rising action and, indeed, the climax of the book pondering the potential for this new romance, I want to put the book down and never pick it up again. In fact, I do put the book down and walk away from it. Robinson's dedication to the private lives of his coppers is so strong, he actually leaves Banks' romance open ended — I trust that dedicated readers of the Banks series are actually anxious for the next book to come out so they can find out if the Inspector has found true love at last!
The mystery, the reason I picked the book up in the first place, takes a back seat to the soap opera of the characters' lives. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill mystery anyway. It's all about — surprise surprise — serial killers who rape and torture young women. That's innovative and fresh, isn't it?
In style, it's reminiscent of PD James' Dalgliesh novels, though without James' consummate skill and fascinating "guest characters". The main character, Banks, appears to be a watered down combination of Dalgliesh and Inspector Rebus but he lacks the charm and intellect of the former and the overpowering melancholy of the latter. Like Robert B. Parker, Robinson attempts to instill his own personal passions into his character but, whereas Parker weaves Spenser's culinary flair fairly subtly into each narrative, Robinson overwhelms us with his own musical expertise on almost every page of this book. A character can't go into a cafe without Robinson indulging himself with a half-page exploration not just of the song that happens to be playing on the cafe's sound system but also of the system itself (Banks has an iPod that he can plug into the stereo of his Porsche, donchaknow!), the CD upon which the song is featured as well as where the character first heard the song and how it's stayed with him all his life.
Did I mention I was feeling bitter?
My sister Lynn told me this is Robinson's weakest book. I hope to goodness it is because I simply cannot imagine reading anything worse. Even my own books. Okay, maybe that's pushing it.