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Michael Gruber
TROPIC OF NIGHT (2003) Reviewed by Patrick Killough I. Review for http://www.barnesandnoble.com Here is how your review will appear on the title page: REVIEWER: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), admiring cross-cultural insights, June 29, 2006, TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Miami learns there are more powerful religions than voodoo and santeria. Rating of this book: THREE STARS ( * * * ) Rich American white girl anthropologist Jane Doe (sic!) was raised a serious Roman Catholic by her old wealth Yankee parents. Her sister is a fashion model who is ritually murdered just before giving birth. By that time Jane had studied anthropology and done field work in Siberia studying folk magic. After a job-related physical collapse and recovery, Jane had married black American poet De Witt Moore. Moore hates 'cracker' America and searches for ways to become a black Hitler to avenge Africans everywhere. Jane had brought him to Nigeria and Mali on an anthropological study trip where they both fell under the spells of conjurers and mysterious wise men. Her guru was good. De Witt's was evil. He committed ritual murder, after which Jane fled and survived another physical and psychic collapse. Jane Doe later fled to Florida after her gorgeous, pregnant sister, is slain in a ritual murder. But first she blows up her father's boat and fakes suicide. In multi-cultural Miami Jane assumes the lay identity of a Salesian nun who died in Africa, disguises herself and takes on menial work in a hospital. She fears that her husband will seek her out and require her to be an audience to future atrocities. Meanwhile the husband has in fact reached Miami and is going through ritual slayings and cannibalism of pregnant women and their babies. Detective Jimmy Paz, a black Cuban-American begins to put together clues that point to Jane. All is made clear in a very violent, witchraft-filled ending. This is not a classic detective story. There are not enough clues early on for readers to solve anything on their own. It is a pleasantly didactic novel, full of lore about primitive peoples and their encounters with gods and spirits. It is cross-cultural, too. Faith versus science. Africans versus Americans. It is also a mystery. There are drugs and deeds explored which modern rationalism is not up to. Jane Doe is an implausible character: well educated, solidly grounded in Christianity, but easily blown away by exposure to ghosts, dreams and magic. Intensely erotic, she manages in occasional flirtations with holiness to sound like Graham Greene. Thus when the detective wonders why she doesn't just dump her Hitlerian husband, she says that marriage is forever. Anybody can love virtues. 'It's the unllovely stuff that makes love. We all have a little nasty wounded place in us, and if you can get someone to find that and love it, then you really have something.' (Chapter Thirty, p. 380.) Also recommended: G. K. Chesterton, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. Sir Walter Scott, THE PIRATE. Graham Greene, THE END OF THE AFFAIR. --OOO-- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=----=---=---=-=-= II. Review for http://www.amazon.com Reviewer's Rating of TROPIC OF NIGHT: THREE STARS ( * * *) TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: A Sir Walter Scott Wannabe writes a ghost story of all ghost stories, June 30, 2006 Reviewer T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) Michael Gruber's TROPIC OF NIGHT (2003) is studded with fine parts which, one by one, make it a good ghost story read. But those parts are better than the whole they are meant to create. Africa, Nigeria and Mali, come to life as very different places from the USA. The African origins of the new world (especially Cuban and Cuban-Miami) religions of voodoo and santeria are sketched and fleshed out through fictional practitioners. Implausibly, however, the Miami police force functions without notable input from a district of attorney. Predictably, people bad from the beginning of their lives only get worse. Those who are good are tempted to evil but given the means of recovery. This is the story of white anthropologist Jane Doe and her black poet husband De Witt Moore, who hates white American "crackers" and seeks to avenge through his poetry their misdeeds against black folk. The sometime couple's lives among practitioners of the dark side of primitive magic intersect in Miami with those of Cuban-American black detective Jimmy Paz and his santeria-practicing restauranteur mother. There are tales of seamanship, sibling rivalry, addiction to sex and much else. But the parts do not add up to a unified, credible whole. TROPIC OF NIGHT will strike some readers as in the tradition of the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Like Scott, Gruber vividly describes his settings and brings them to life. He is fascinated by "superstitions," as is Scott. But unlike Scott, his characters are not three-dimensional. His Jane Doe is as flat as Sinclair Lewis's Carol Kennicott in MAIN STREET. She is not the lively, credible human that Rebecca, Jewess of York, is in IVANHOE. Strangely, the most memorable characters in TROPIC OF NIGHT are American zombies sent by Witt Moore to intimidate Jane Doe. Charitably, however, it is not hard to imagine that in two or three more tries Gruber will be a worthy colleague of the Laird of Abbotsford. -OOO- |