Morte Point (Ben Bracken, 2)Robert Parker
Endeavour Quill, 23 July 2018
PB, e 265pp
I'm grateful to for an advance copy of Morte Point for review and for being part of the blog tour. (I'm especially grateful to Robert for his kind message in my copy).
Morte Point is a thriller, with near relentless action. This is not a genre I read frequently, so I won't try to compare it to others or to analyse how it measures up to them. I will say that, for this reader, it was a compulsive, absorbing and - yes, I know this is often sneered at - page-turnery read. Parker sticks, I think, to the bare bones: a man on the run, a woman, a deadly secret, treachery in high places and a great deal of violence.
If you're going to say "but that isn't very plausible" well nor is a crime story featuring a cerebral detective and sidekick solving the murder by insight rather than by crunching data, and yet here we are. A sonnet isn't a very natural way to speak, either, yet the discipline of following a structure inspires creativity. The template followed here isn't so far from, say, The Thirty Nine Steps, with a returnee man of action (Ben Bracken, from Parker's A Wanted Man) arriving in Britain only to be confronted by murder and intrigue, taking off pursued by the bad guys, and having both to work out what's going on and to stay alive. The point is how this is then made compelling to read.
Much of the compulsion of Morte Point comes, for example, from the little decisions that Bracken makes, the steps he takes to hide the pursuit, stay ahead and - bluntly - not die. I'm no expert but Parker makes, for me, a credible account of how that might just work - perhaps with a bit of licence here and there. What are the essentials a man on the run needs, and where does he find them? Which way should be run? What are the risks that need to be taken, and which are the ones to avoid? This is all interesting because we can easily imagine being in Bracken's position, even we can't quite grasp the details of the wider conspiracy he's tangled up with.
Parker also plays with our sympathies a bit: Bracken is introduced as a bit of a vigilante but in a way that makes one warm to him, but Parker then has him do things that rather alienate the reader, even if they follow from the logic of the story and even if what he's up against is bigger and much nastier. That creates a bit of a moral dilemma (well, what would you do?) which gives the story some bite.
Bracken's interior point of view - most of the story - is interesting. Parker makes him a shrewd observer, but not a smooth person: his voice comes over as a bit self-absorbed, even a teeny bit pompous - not a natural team member, which injects tension at times when he's forced to work with others. As you might expect, it's the sections of the story where Bracken is on his own, making his way, that are most compulsive, as though dealing with others takes his energy down a level. Again I think that reminds me of Richard Hannay in The Thirty Nine Steps - Buchan's book, not Hitchcock's film, although in plot terms the denouement here is perhaps closer in atmosphere to the film than the original book, in that it brings things to a real climax.
That climax sets us up for Bracken's next adventure, I hope, in a sudden turn that I really hadn't seen coming, leaving things pretty much hanging. It'll be interesting to see what Parker does next!
You can buy Morte Point from Amazon here.
For more information from Robert Parker, see his website https://robertparkerauthor.com/, follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/robparkerauthor or on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/robertparkerauthor. Endeavour Quill is at www.endeavourmedia.co.uk and on Twitter and Facebook at www.twitter.com/EndeavourQuill and www.facebook.com/EndeavourMedia1 respectively.
No comments:
Post a Comment