THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511250175
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
FINDING MOON
TONY HILLERMAN
HarperCollins. 319 pp. $24.
In 1970, against the advice of his then-agent, Tony Hillerman sent off to Harper and Row The Blessing Way, the first in a mystery-novel series that traces the adventures of Navajo detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. He disregarded the agent's advice to ``Get rid of all that Indian stuff,'' and the book was published to good reviews and a small muttering of public approval.
Nine more Leaphorn-Chee mysteries followed to even better reviews and more resounding public applause. The Navajos even gave him the tribe's Special Friend Award.
Only once in the past quarter of a century has Hillerman's fiction drifted from the heart of his story, the Navajo religion and lore, and that was in 1971 in The Fly on the Wall, when he wrote about a reporter who stumbles upon a political scandal and a murder.
In Finding Moon, Hillerman has once again left his Navajos behind. In a brief prefatory note he even apologizes for it - ``To my fellow desert rats, my apologies for wandering away from our beloved Navajo canyon country. The next book will bring Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn of the Tribal Police back into action.''
Hillerman's readers have become accustomed to the sharp characterizations not only of people but of culture and geography. In Hillerman's hands, the Southwest has the same sort of spirituality that Willa Cather saw in the people and the place. In Finding Moon Hillerman not only leaves the Navajos behind, but he leaves much of the mystery genre behind as well.
But these are not criticisms, for this new novel, his 11th, is one of his best. It is an adventure story whose weight is equally balanced between characterization and thrilling plot. Similar to many of Hillerman's novels, Finding Moon is a love story. It is also a story of a search for spiritual identity - and in this sense it is a mystery novel of a high order, indeed.
Finding Moon tells of Malcolm ``Moon'' Mathias, the third-rate managing editor of a third-rate newspaper in Durance, Colo. Moon could be the poster boy for Henry David Thoreau's campaign against living a life of quiet desperation. He goes through the motions in his job and is trapped in an unhealthy relationship with a younger woman. Moon feels the weight of a mistake he made as a young man. He loathes himself for the mistake he made, for the fact that he escaped punishment for it, and because those he loved had to suffer for his sins.
As the narrative opens, it is 1975, and Moon's brother Ricky, who operated an air service in Southeast Asia, has just been killed in a helicopter crash. Shortly after Moon finds out about Ricky's death he also discovers that his brother had an infant daughter and that his mother has had a heart attack en route to the Philippines to find her.
Moon's journey to find his niece becomes a journey of redemption, a pilgrimage in which he travels toward love and a discovery of self. And Hillerman, who draws New Mexico and Arizona with the confidence of a cartographer, seems as assured as a historian recounting the aftermath of America's final days in Vietnam and suggesting the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Paced beautifully, Finding Moon moves forward through 27 days in Mathias' life, swept on its own current of clear prose, intelligent and interesting characters and exciting plot.
Although Finding Moon is not a traditional detective story, it offers readers the same aesthetic-psychological release. As the world becomes more riddled with crime and chaos, solace can be found in the fulfillment dramatized in crime novels (and their near cousins), in stories where justice is done, where evil sometimes get punished, and where good can triumph.
In a recent interview, Tony Hillerman said that it was liberating and challenging to write about new people and different scenes. There was no need for his apology: When a storyteller like Hillerman finds the right tale to tell, as he does in Finding Moon, it is the reader who is liberated and challenged, no matter where the story is set. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and literature at Old Dominion
University and is the author or ``Imagined Places: Journeys into
Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' by CNB