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Volume
15, Number 15 |
Also in
this section:  The Devil --- or was that God? --- made him do it a book review by Eric Jackson The Edge
of Reason
by Melinda Snodgrass TOR Fantasy, New York (2008) 372 pp in paperback, $7.99 (more here) ISBN 978-7653-5420-4 The Edge of Reason
is a cop story set mainly in Albuquerque. Its cast
of supporting characters includes a foxy and fickle teenage witch, a
county medical examiner descended from New Mexico's Crypto-Jews, and a
homeless man troubled by a multiple personality disorder --- whose
incarnations so happen to be the rank-and-file of humanity's gods.
So are the Lumina, headed by a rationalist business tycoon who just might be Satan, the good guys or the bad guys? And what about the Old Ones, the rival gang headed by a rich, powerful and well nigh amoral televangelist, who deep down inside appears to be an illegal alien from another dimension? It's the long-running war between reason and faith, between science and magic, and the skirmishing has broken out on the beat of an artistic, unmagical and sexually uptight Albuquerque cop from an aristocratic New England family. The golem attacks and zombie drive-by shootings aren't half as weird as this tale gets. Let this review digress for a moment. Among several new English-language online media that purport to cover Panama, one
proudly --- or shall we say shamelessly? --- proclaims that it has no
point of view. That sort of claim is always false, and in the news business that usually means
that it's written from the point of view that what the dominant forces in
society believe is revealed truth that no sane person would question. The
Panama News has various contributors with different points of view, and
an editor and publisher who tries to be fair but doesn't attempt to
conceal his world view behind Fox News-style claims about being
"objective." And The Edge of Reason, like all other cultural works, is
also written by a person with a point of view.
In this case it's the relentlessly secular Melinda Snodgrass, whose name as a writer is not as famous as it ought to be because the work that has taken up many years of her career was screenwriting for Star Trek: The Next Generation and other television shows. Here Snodgrass shows that she can write novels, and do so very well. So how do we pigeonhole this work? Do we put it next to Steven King's The Stand, or next to Harlan Ellison's Deathbird? Although none of them quite say so, these three works appear to have a character in common, albeit as seen through a widely divergent triad of viewpoints and presented in very different styles. And does The Edge of Reason belong on the same shelf with Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, or among hardboiled detective thrillers? Both of those cases can be made, too. Whenever reading a work of fiction, it's a good idea to think about its messages, meaning and context. If the book is one of distinctive creativity, it's much less helpful for the reader to think about its genre. Just understand that The Edge of Reason is a fascinating and downright different read that's well attuned to very real things that are going on in Ms. Snodgrass's times and place. Also in
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2009 by Eric Jackson email: editor@thepanamanews.com or e_l_jackson_malo@yahoo.com Mailing
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