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Flint |
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F lint byPaul Eddy G.P. Putnam 338 pages, September 2000 ISBN 0399146539 Reviewed by Reed Andrus In another of those surprisingly frequent instances of genre synchronicity I’m fond of discussing, it seems that quite a few of the better books I’ve come across in the past couple of months have been written by veteran journalists. To the names of Edna Buchanan, Howard Swindle, and Brian McGrory, another can be added – Paul Eddy. Putnam provides a considerable amount of information about Eddy before turning the page count over to fiction – much like Swindle and Buchanan, Mr. Eddy has written several works of non-fiction over a period of twenty-five years while reporting for the London Sunday Times. He is, in short, a veteran writer, and his first novel proves his experience. Flint opens with a singularly thrilling (and violent) depiction of a police undercover operation gone awry. Grace Flint and Pete Pendle, members of London’s Metropolitan Police, are ambushed in a stairwell by the men they’re attempting to capture. Pendle is immediately shot dead, and only a jammed mechanism on the pistol saves Grace from a similar fate. Her fate is quite different: "He leans against the wall to maintain his balance while he methodically stamps her chest with the heel of one of his handmade Italian boots. Perhaps out of some irrational impulse he is trying to destroy the microphone as if by doing so he can erase the evidence it has collected. He only succeeds in driving it deep into her abdominal wall. Then he goes to work on her face, the heel of his boot raining down blows on her with the indifferent brutality of a jackhammer. She loses consciousness – though not for long if her recollections are accurate. She will recall for the inquiry lying in the stairwell like a broken doll, tasting her own blood and the gritty enamel of her shattered teeth, smelling her own urine, listening to the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, listening to Pete Pendle die." Readers will immediately note that the author does some interesting things with tense and viewpoint. Eddy’s style is on-again, off-again between present and past tense, always in third person omniscient, as he recounts past events and foreshadows those of the future. You will either like or hate Eddy’s method. Personally, I had no trouble with it. Deconstructed to its essentials, Flint is a novel of revenge. Grace Flint survives her ordeal. Indeed, most of the story is narrated by Harry Cohen, a former member of British Security Services, who’s following the eponymous Flint across several continents as she pursues the man responsible for her injuries, a nasty bloke named Frank Harling. Then the author wraps a much larger conspiracy motif around his basic story and the plot becomes complicated. Arguably, the king of conspiracy novels is Robert Ludlum. I fondly remember the thrill of discovering The Scarlatti Inheritance, but fell away from his works quite a while ago, after his constant padding reached critical mass. Give me a Daniel Easterman or Jon Land any ol’ day. The basic problem with stories that hinge on the existence of a world-spanning conspiracy is the absence of a true villain, someone the reading audience can focus on and hate with unfettered purple passion. Flint suffers a bit from this ambiguity, but rallies at the finish to provide a better-than-average reading experience, and perhaps generate a small nod of the head to the conspirators that make up genre award committees. |
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