I recently looked Jack O'Connell up in the archives and was
kind of surprised by how many times I had asked if anyone
knew if and when his next book would come out. Ten years
after 1998's Word Made Flesh, here The Resurrectionist
finally is, another great addition to his Quinsigamond
series. I recommend it highly.
That said, it made me think about the idea of "transcending
the genre," but not in the way we've talked about it here in
the past. Usually we've used the concept to describe books
that allegedly "rise above" the usual genre "restrictions" to
become something "more than." These are often praised for a
writing style so artistic that it calls attention to itself
as literary and/or its forefronting of social issues that are
supposedly absent from "simple" genre works. As has been
noted by Jim and others, there's a fair amount of
condescension in play here and I don't think it's a
coincidence that it's often slumming literary authors who
seek to transcend the genre.
But none of that applies to Jack O'Connell and his books.
First of all, O'Connell clearly loves, respects and is very
knowledgeable on the genre, even edited an issue of Paradoxa
on noir, which was later published in book form (keep meaning
to pick that up). So he is condescending to nothing, does not
see noir as something lower to condescend to. However, from
the very beginning, his series has been something outside the
norm of the genre. First of all, his is a series by virtue of
setting, not character. While not unprecedented (for example,
Dennis Lynd's Buena Costa County mysteries written as John
Crowe), but it is rare. And Quinsigamond is no ordinary
place. It is a decaying town of empty, rusting factories left
by the industries that deserted the town and its people. And
O'Connell has increasingly played up the German Expressionist
and, here, the related Gothic aspects of the setting.
His first book, Box Nine, is the most orthodox crime novel of
the series, with a cop as the main character and a plot based
on her going after a drug lord. And while it's a relatively
straight narrative, O'Connell is already touching on some
weighty concepts on the periphery, using the book's drug,
Lingo, to make passing allusions to issues of language and
all sorts of posts, structuralism, modernism, etc. I
certainly don't mean to imply it becomes a dry text to be
trudged through, or even a postmodern narrative to be
perplexed by. Not at all, the book works well as a
thriller.
However, each successive book has gotten a bit further away
from the thriller aspect. O'Connell has certainly not skimped
on the entertainment value of his books, has always offered a
"good read," but they are no longer simple cops and robbers
stories. And each deals with a form of storytelling, radio,
movies, and comic books.
And this is where I get back to the idea of transcending the
genre. O'Connell has always been led by the story he has to
tell, and this one has less to do with crime, well a specific
crime (criminals are represented in the form of a biker gang,
among others). So I'm not really sure if The Resurrectionist
actually still qualifies as noir, though there are plenty of
dark goings on, so much as gothic. There is even a mad
scientist, well, two, if you count the one in the parallel
story.
You see, you get two stories for the price of one in this
book. The main story is about Sweeney, a man whose son is in
a coma. He brings Danny to the Peck Clinic in Quinsigamond,
which has had a couple of very small successes in reviving
coma patients and sees Danny as a prime candidate. It doesn't
take long to realize that there are some very odd, even
sinister things going on in this clinic, though. Paralleling
this are occasional chapters of Sweeney reading his comatose
son an issue of the complex story of his favorite comic book,
Limbo, about the travails of a traveling troupe of freak show
freaks. The parallels between the real world and the comic
book become stronger and stronger. Throw in a biker gang with
mysterious ties to the clinic and you've got another great
dark tale of Quinsigamond.
But O'Connell may have transcended the genre, not by giving
us something more (the genre is enough), but by giving us
something very different. He has crossbred the genre with so
many other things that it is something other, something
unique. Most of all, though, it's a great, albeit very
strange, read.
Mark
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