Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511170123
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Devoted fans (Is there any other kind?) of Tony Hillerman's stalwarts of the Navajo Tribal Police, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, are cautioned to set aside their disappointment at the news that in his new tale our master storyteller has jumped the reservation (temporarily he assures us in an opening apology) to deliver a rollicking good adventure in another time and in a different place - Cambodia and Vietnam during the chaotic collapse of 1975.
Our unlikely hero this time around is Moon (short for Moon Pie, a childhood addiction) Mathias, once a sergeant of armor and now the managing editor of a small Colorado daily newspaper, who finds himself sucked into the whirlpool of disaster that the South China Sea had become at that time.
Longtime followers of Hillerman will sense reflections from his 1971 novel, "The Fly On the Wall" in which the protagonist, the political columnist for a midwestern daily newspaper, was confronted by murders, criminal conspiracies, and death threats. Both Moon and the earlier John Cotton have small town backgrounds, suffer Fourth Decade Syndrome, are involved with women half their age, have problems with their mothers, know few friends, and carry enormous self-inflicted burdens of doubt.
Moon's reluctant and oblique slide down an almost random sluice of action begins following the death of his brother Ricky in a helicopter crash in Cambodia. Ricky had been the hustling proprietor of a spook airline. The estate he has left to Moon includes little other than a grounded airline with a scattered string of hangars and warehouses, a mythic Moon legend spread across Asia by this admiring brother, and a missing and heretofore unknown niece, courtesy of Ricky and his vanished Cambodian wife.
There is no letup in the action that moves through the Philippines and one of President Ferdinand Marcos' prison compounds, into the confusion of collapsing South Vietnam, and on to confront the horrors of the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Moon's irregulars, including a delightful mystery woman, have every faith in him as the fearless force who will lead them to their various objectives. He must rise to the giant's height that his brother has created for him.
There is no villain in this odyssey - at least none that presents a specific human personification of the evil that shapes every aspect of this tightly woven tale. The true villains are those inhuman and terrifying institutions of governance that we humans persist in creating to ruin our lives and turn our dreams into nightmares.
Paul E. Fitzgerald is a recovering journalist who lives on a farm, overlooking Fincastle.
by CNB