Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406140219
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Timothy Findley. Crown. $23.
One occasionally runs across a goofy sort of book that leaves the suspicion that there may just be more to it than you can understand. That's "Headhunter," an American reprint of a Canadian novel of last year by a prolific and popular writer from the Toronto suburbs. There are so many plots and subplots that the thing resists simple summary. One, for example, involves a schizoid librarian who thinks she's allowed the infamous Kurtz to escape from Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" into downtown Toronto. That sort of thing.
Of course, there has to be a psychiatrist or two, and some other psy-fi weirdness involving literature, disease, good and evil. If it'd all just been titled "Fear and Loathing Come to Canada," we'd think this was Hunter Thompson trying to go straight.
The Falling Hills.
By Perry Lentz. University of South Carolina Press. paper (price not listed).
The best thing about this novel, originally published in 1967 and now in re-issue, is the portrait it gives of the savage inter- and intra-family bitterness that marked the Civil War in parts of Tennessee (and southwestern Virginia, too, it might be added). The worst things about it are (1) the gratuitous self- battering that Lentz gives himself in a new introduction because, horror of horrors, he used the word "Negro"; (2) the fact that it's wordy and occasionally polemical and (3) though it's supposed to be about the distinguished and controversial Confederate cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, it has relatively little to say about him in the text, and ignores recent scholarship about him in the new introduction. As a warning of the danger that awaits the writer of so-called historical novels, it succeeds quite well.
The Forty Fathom Bank.
A novella by Les Galloway. Chronicle Books. $10.95.
Most self-published books, whether from a vanity press or otherwise, are too embarrassingly bad to be read by anyone with a choice in the matter. "The Forty Fathom Bank" is an exception. Privately printed in 1984, it has now found the commercial life it deserves. Les Galloway, who died in 1990, put together a story of two shark fishermen, and of what an unspoken greed does to one of them. The story is spare, as clean and as sharp as a strong fishook. The ending is openly existensialistic, which might seem a weakness to some. To say that the story was done earlier by Hemingway and others is not, however, to say that it was done better.
Louisiana Blue.
By David Poyner. St. Martin's. $22.
David Poyner is a hot writer and a prolific one. This is the third in his "Blue" series, or the tales of Tiller Galloway, late of Hatteras and now a deep water diver for a shady Gulf firm. The problem is that Poyner is so anxious to convince the reader that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to diving that he makes the thing read like a textbook. If ol' Tiller's airhose had been as thin as Poyner's storyline, he'd have run out of sustenance in the first ten minutes. Prospective readers should keep that in mind; the miracles that constantly rescue Tiller from his troubles may not be available to them.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
by CNB