I wasn’t sure what to make of this novel
when I was approached by its author to read for a possible review. It sounded
to me like YA fiction, though that turned out to be only one element of its active blending and bending of genres: coming-of-age story, cautionary tale, international espionage
thriller, and kill-or-be-killed western set in modern-day Colorado.
In an afterword, Dancer says the novel is
about fathers. We are given a clue of that already in the title, and though the
pivotal character is an 18-year-old boy, it would not be misleading to claim patriarchy
and fatherhood as themes underlying the narrative.
Father. So let’s start with the father in the
novel. He is in many ways a man of heroic stature that any boy might even romanticize
about: skilled with weapons, an operative in the service of national security,
his missions cloaked in secrecy. The problem is that he is an absentee father,
having mysteriously disappeared, except to materialize on the news from
surveillance footage as a suspected terrorist bomber.
Dancer even thickens the mystery by making
him the victim of amnesia. He doesn’t know who he is or what he’s done. His
son, Billy, is left to draw his own conclusions, which are not sympathetic to
his father. The boy has bonded with his mother, who has built a new life after
being abandoned by her husband 10 years before.
Focused on family issues, this is a
coming-of-age story set in a broken home, where a boy is left to grow up on his
own, the protector of his much loved and vulnerable mother and nursing contempt
for the man who deserted her. Such a situation would not be out of place in a
YA novel—maybe YA for adults, which to be fair puts it in the company of several popular
bestsellers today.
Son. As in much YA fiction, the young
protagonist has been robbed of his innocence. Dancer complicates this nicely by
showing that, unknown to Billy, his father has also lost the idealism that
once led him to devote his life to the dangerous business of
counterespionage—even at the cost of losing his family.
His choices have also heightened his son’s
vulnerability, which the boy counters by sharpening his skill with firearms, and
just in time for two other developments: the abduction of his mother by henchmen
of what we learn is a Special Forces-trained Mexican drug cartel, and the loss
of a father figure and protector of both mother and son, an admirable man who
serves as the local sheriff.
So we have a boy at the center of the
story being pushed into adulthood as his family disintegrates around him in a
wave of violence. Taken figuratively, what we are
presented with here is the traumatized terrain of much YA fiction, where
teenagers are faced with adult dilemmas that they must master with personal
resources they have not yet fully developed, while the safety of home and
parents becomes a distant memory.
How this is all resolved I will not spoil
by going any farther. Enough to say that the novel is a page-turner, driven by
suspenseful shifting of points of view among the central characters: the boy,
his mother, and father. Dancer even follows the structure of an
action-adventure movie with short chapters and abrupt cuts between them. The prose style is often spare, matter of fact, unadorned. Here is a sample:
Caveats. The narrative is tightly plotted until the
final chapters, where Dancer reveals what has been driving the actions of the
supposed terrorist, Billy’s father. It’s either a McGuffin (cf. Alfred
Hitchcock’s Notorious) or a Doom’s
Day Scenario that threatens an ending like Dr.
Strangelove, and Dancer has not quite worked out the complexities produced
by mixing genres as the novel adroitly does until this point.
Patriarch Run has generated
something of a fan club already at goodreads and amazon, and the ending does
not seem to trouble anyone who has left an appreciative multi-star review
there. But I would’ve liked a conclusion with a greater sense of the ambiguity,
parallels, and ironies raised in the novel. Among other things, it calls out
for an understanding of patriarchy in the vision of the perilous world its final
pages evoke.
Patriarch Run is currently
available for kindle and the nook at amazon and Barnes&Noble.
Coming up: Richard Bissell, High Water (1954)
Sounds pretty interesting. I'll give it a look.
ReplyDeleteSounds good.
ReplyDelete