Barry Eisler's "Rain" Series

Have you noticed how publishing has shifted recently toward publishing series rather than stand-alone novels? This is particularly true in fantasy, science fiction, and detective/private investigator thrillers. The good part is that if you like a particular author or character, you have several other novels that you can add to your reading list knowing that they probably will also be to your taste. The bad part is that, sometimes, the author doesn’t know when to quit, and the final book or two will be thin or repetitive compared to the excitement of the new concepts in the first few.

I’m glad to say that Barry Eisler’s six-volume series about assassin John Rain hits all the right notes, and only runs about one novel too long. I suspect that his original plan for the character’s story was told in the first five volumes, and then he simply couldn’t resist doing a sixth. I hope he stops here, for as much as I like the character, I think Eisler has turned him inside out, and anything more would be a disappointment.

In “Rain Fall”, we are introduced to John Rain – half American, half Japanese – in the process of exercising his specialty, which is making assassination look like natural death. We are introduced to a vibrant glimpse of Tokyo as the backdrop for a man who has the wherewithal to indulge his tastes for expensive hotels, food, and liquor, but whose life is so secretive that he has few friends. This is about to change, however, as he meets Midori, the daughter of the man he killed, and becomes even more deeply involved when he learns that she is in danger.

“Hard Rain” follows. John has now separated himself from the yakuza and the CIA who gave him the majority of his assignments and has aligned himself with Tatzu, a Japanese detective who works for the Japanese FBI. Midori, his young lover, now believes John is dead. But her contact with John’s friend Harry, the young computer expert, leads Rain’s enemies to target Harry as a way to get to Rain, and Rain gets involved again with the yakuza as he tries to protect his friend.

In “Rain Storm”, John has left Japan and his yakuza enemies behind. Now he has a contract in Macau, an Albanian arms-dealer and compulsive gambler with a lovely blonde companion. Rain soon learns that he is not the only one stalking his target, and has to decide whether his competitors are allies or enemies that he must also dispose of. In this book he meets two new unlikely allies – Dox, an American sniper with whom he had served in Afghanastan, and Delilah, an Israeli operative whose specialty is getting close to target with the well-known “honey trap” method.

“Killing Rain” takes up the story with John and Dox accepting a contract from Israeli intelligence to remove a bomb-maker who sells his services to the highest bidder. But the fact that he has a wife and young son causes Rain to hesitate at a crucial moment, putting them all in danger. We learn that Rain’s father died when he was very young, and for the first time he considers how this young boy will react to his father’s death as well. The burden of guilt is beginning to seep through John’s tightly-constructed emotional walls.

At the end of “Killing Rain”, John discovers that his affair with the lost Midori resulted in the birth of a son. “The Last Assassin” is the story of how he tries to resolve the longing he has to be a father to his son, to leave the life he has to adopt a new one. But there are several loose ends to be tied up first, especially since his yakuza enemy from the first book is having Midori watched, knowing that Rain may make contact. In order to free Midori and his son from danger, John must assassinate this powerful yakuza.

“Requiem for an Assassin” wraps up the series. Rain has concluded that he can never be with Midori, and tries to build himself a new life outside his specialized profession. But a former CIA antagonist wants him back and kidnaps his former partner, Dox, to ensure Rain’s cooperation. While Dox struggles to survive under torture, Rain has to kill three people to free him. What he doesn’t know is that the third victim is supposed to be himself.

The series is rich in background of exotic locales in the Far East; jazz and fine liquors; and the nuances of surveillance detection and martial arts. Rain is a complex and fascinating protagonist and the plots are complex and timely.

Bottom line: A torrent of good reading.

Q Road

Basic writing courses will tell you that a novel can have a strong plot, strong characters, or both. While the latter is the ideal, many novels get by just fine with one or the other – a complex and intriguing plot can drive a book even if the characters are cardboard, and a soft plotline can be excused if the characters are terribly compelling. But when both are lacking, the resulting story is generally a waste of paper.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, “Q Road” attempts to be a character-driven novel. Set in rural Kalamazoo county in present day, the reader is introduced to a farmer with an amputated index finger, an asthmatic boy, a part-Indian wild girl, a neighbor who sees evidence of aliens at every turn, and a smooth-talking window salesman whose wife fantasizes about murdering him with a butcher knife. These people should be much more interesting than they are. As it is, the reader can almost see the painstaking work the author has done to think up oddities and carefully assign one or two per character. But human beings are more than the sum of their quirks.

To her credit, Campbell does have a talent for description and portrays the farmland, woods, and river with more depth. She opens the novel with a picture of wooly caterpillars migrating across a road, an obvious metaphor for the mindless striving toward ultimate transfiguration, but the analogy falls short even though it beautifully sets the scene of a Michigan autumn.

We learn early that “Q Road” stands for Queer Road, but the word is used in the old-fashioned sense, in reference to the eccentric characters that line the rural road, not a euphemism for gay. In the context of modern day lexicography, this seems almost misleading.

George Harland, a middle-aged farmer, has married seventeen-year old Rachel, illegitimate daughter of a hermit woman who succumbed one night to a liaison with a stranger, and who raised her daughter to hunt, trap, and live a barely-legitimate life on a rusted houseboat moored on a riverbank in the woods. Rachel craves land, and George, who owns a large but deteriorating farm, craves her. This is the basis of their marriage, where there is sex but no conversation. Rachel carries a rifle and after nearly killing David, a twelve year old boy with asthma, develops some odd affection for him that means he is one of the few people she will speak to. David, in turn, worships George, dreaming of being adopted by the farmer and working with him every day, fantasizing that hard labor will toughen his lungs and cure his asthma. Because his father is long gone and his mother thinks only of moving to California, with or without her son, David feels the need for a parent that he imagines George would fill splendidly.

Rachel has secrets, but it is difficult to say if her abrasive personality is a result of them or simply because of her unusual upbringing. Her initial sexual experience ends in violence that leads to the first secret, and it seems to tie her to the land even more tightly. When her mother disappears, she seems to care very little about the loss, or wonder at all what has happened to her, but simply persists in being silent and angry.

George has memories, tied to the land, with his grandfather’s stories of lust and jealousy, remembrance of a woman schoolteacher driven away because she slept with a farmhand, and the tornado that came that same night as if in divine punishment. George knows that someday he may have to break up his farm and sell off pieces to housing developers, yet still he persists because he knows nothing else to do.

So Rachel cultivates her Indian garden, grows pumpkins and squash that she sells at her roadside stand, and watches the wooly bear caterpillars migrate across the road. David helps George stack bales of hay in the barn. Steve the window salesman drives around, talking to women with vague lust in his mind and imagination, while his wife Nicole thinks of killing him between plans of building a new home, as if the perfect home is the remedy for an indifferent marriage.

Other characters like Milton, who operates a restaurant that celebrates Jesus and the history of farming, populate the novel but often do little to enhance it. Since the story is minimal, it is hard to judge when progress is being made. Do people change during the events in this book? It is difficult to say, because they are so slippery that the reader cannot grasp them, nor predict what they might or might not have done anyway. For example, a character named April May keeps the secret of a murder, but the reader can’t tell why. Is it related to the fact that she was hurt in the tornado so many years ago? A nail went “clean through” her foot, but this subtle reference to crucifixion, if it is even deliberate, tells us nothing else about her personality.

The blurbs on the novel celebrate the “marvelously rendered details” and “rich imagery” of the book, and Campbell does have a way with a phrase. But a painting of a rural Michigan farm, no matter how beautifully done, no matter what vibrant colors are used, no matter how expensive the canvas and frame, is not a movie, and a book that is primarily description is a classroom exercise, not a novel.

Bottom line: “Q Road” rambles.

Running with Scissors

“Running with Scissors” by Augusten Burroughs is a memoir that made the New York Times bestseller list and has received much critical acclaim. It’s not hard to understand why. The story is so fantastic in a morbid way that reading it is a bit like watching a car accident or a wildfire… it’s frightening and repulsive but one cannot turn away. Yet the tale is so outside the typical reader’s experience that it comes across as surreal and ultimately doesn’t really touch the core of emotion. Perhaps many of us are so numb to the indifference with which one person can treat another that it takes extraordinary writing to pierce through our protective shields. Burroughs’ talent is not sufficient to accomplish this and his memoir reads like bad fiction rather than the revelation of truth it is meant to be.

Augusten’s father is an alcoholic and his mother is a crazy, self-centered poet. Early memories are of spectacular arguments between them. It’s little wonder with everything around him so out of his control, Augusten concentrates on dressing impeccably and surrounding himself with shiny objects and mirrors. He imagines himself a doctor or a celebrity and spends his time performing for the unseen camera, posing. He tries to impose control on a chaotic life.

But life gets more chaotic, not less. After the divorce, his mother spends more and more time in the care of Dr. Fitch, her psychiatrist. Augusten is left to stay with Dr. Fitch’s family in their house, which is both filthy and totally out of control. Dr. Fitch believes that showing anger is healthy, so arguments abound. No one cleans anything unless they want to, so dirty dishes are piled in the sink and the toddler runs naked and excretes on the rug. The furniture is full of holes. For fun, they play ‘electroshock therapy’, or ask questions of God and poke their finger randomly into the Bible to get their answer. A couple of the kids decide to pull down the kitchen ceiling and install a skylight, so when the doctor arises one morning, there is rubble three feet deep across the floor. He’s not upset. “Well, quite a project you have going here,” he says to them as he makes his way to the fridge to get his morning orange juice.

Children attend school if and when they want to. When Augusten feels he can’t stand to attend anymore, Dr. Fitch helps him fake a suicide attempt so he can be released from school to undergo six months of psychotherapy. Augusten is fine with this. So’s his mother, who realizes that she won’t have to bother about her son for a long stretch of time, leaving her free to write her poetry.

Augusten, who also happens to be gay, gets involved with a 33-year old man when he is only fourteen. Dr. Finch is fine with this, although he wishes Augusten had chosen someone a little better for him. Augusten’s mother has always liked the young man because he appreciates her poetry, so she tells Augusten that she’s happy to support him in his relationship.

The worst of horrors can make an effective tale, but only when the reader can relate. “Running with Scissors” is so far from most reader’s experience that it becomes a farce, like a game show or a reality TV series where people eat worms for money. We can sit back and chuckle secure in the knowledge that we would never be so foolish, so desperate, so complicit in our own abuse. But we don’t really take it seriously because we can’t. It is all as far outside our experience as it would be if we had grown up on another planet.

So, ultimately, “Running with Scissors” fails to touch. It’s amusing, farcical, cynical, and entertaining, but it doesn’t feel real.

Bottom line: The scissors need sharpening.