Crap Looking Book Responses #2: He Who Hesitates

I thought He Who Hesitates would have little or no space for character development. Apparently it made it by throwing everything else out. Let the ripping to shreds commence, in Crap Looking Books of Which I've Never Heard...

Roger Broome came to the big city and did a BAD THING, and he's going to spend all fucking day deciding if he should tell someone, including the reader.

From the start of this tissue-thin novel there are some obvious rookie mistakes and terrible, terrible devices, most notably the ability of the narration to switch just which head it's coming from, often mid-sentence. Literally everything is explained with painstaking detail, which serves to highlight Broome's naivety, but also makes the entire text slow and ponderous, and has him crawling through the city like the slow fucking Norris while everyone zips around him.

When he's not sitting on a bench staring slack-jawed at a lamppost or contemplating every single sip of a coffee, Roger's thinking back to earlier events, events that are quite frankly much more entertaining and better written. It's as if the writer had a few good scenes in mind and trussed up a novel around them for padding.

Then again, that's most fiction.

The characterisation of Roger Broome is a little bizarre. The distance the author maintains by not revealing the full depth of his Roger's thoughts makes it unclear as to exactly which of the words on the page are Roger's thoughts. On one of the many occasions he decides not to contact the police, there is the suggestion that "maybe it was too early to be bothering them" and I still can't decide if the writer is interpreting that as Roger's reason, or if Roger himself is actively thinking this.

Not a big deal, right? Right, unless the author/Roger starts talking about children and "their small high perfect breasts" or the concession that a rape victim "was probably a slut anyway." Does the author think that kids and their under-formed breasts are just great, or is it just that Roger's a little bit more twisted than his constant James-Stewart-esque "well how do you do?" nonsense would have us believe?

I don't think I've ever wished so hard that someone was a sex offender, that the narrative resolution would show Roger as a baby-eating cattle-raping racist, that it was all in his head and not just the world how the author sees it. Unfortunately, other than the BAD THING, little or no insight is given into Roger's attitudes, and the author apparently remains happily complicit in the racial ignorance and pederasty throughout.

Roger learns nothing, and the reader gains nothing by reading about him. He Who Hesitates is just a wank fantasy toilet book for repressed serial killers and first year college students. Any shock of the final narrative resolution is overshadowed by the ineffectual way the BAD THING is presented, and the fact that pretty much nothing happens.

He sits somewhere. He has a coffee. He sits somewhere else. He takes a "coloured" girl for a walk (and oh it's such a damn shame that's she's "coloured") and then he fucks off home.

He Who Hesitates... fills pages.

Nick
xx

No more crime fiction for a while, and hopefully no more pederasty.