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LAUGHING FALCON, THE by William Deverell McClelland & Stewart, October 2002 417 pages $cdn 9.99 ISBN: 0771027044

It's been a long time since it's been so difficult for me to get into a book. Yet the author, Canadian William Deverell, has won the Dashiel Hammett and the Arthur Ellis awards in the past and has been praised by many reviewers for his works. But THE LAUGHING FALCON is just not my cup of tea.

It starts with a letter from a Manhattan literary agent to a man named Jacques, telling him that he won't advance him money so he can get some poems published, but will advance him several thousand dollars for a novel. The way to do it is to throw in a big red herring, invent a twist, create a kick-ass hero, and have a ravishing heroine.

Cut to Canada, where Maggie Schneider, a TV ad writer going on 30 who also writes romance novels under the pen name Nancy Ward, is getting ready for a two-week vacation in Costa Rica. This will inspire her to write something called The Torrid Zone, with Fiona and Jacques as the lovers. Ah, now we see that the Jacques in the first part is only a character by Maggie, or is he? Is that first part merely the beginning of Maggie's romance novel? We then go through a good number of unnecessary pages giving details of Maggie's life with her fellow workers at the TV studio and with her parents at home, details that have virtually nothing to do with the story. We are treated to more of Maggie's writing style, and we see her safely to Costa Rica.

She meets Pablo Esquivel, who tells her he is a university professor, and she finds herself falling in love with him. Pablo invites her to dinner, sweeps her off her feet ("'Forgive me,' he tells her, 'I cannot hold inside what I feel'") and dances with her ("The feel of his phallus engorging against her groin was sending electric messages down her spine.") While she's concentrating on his phallus, Pablo is stealing $800 from her fanny pack. He then excuses himself to go to the washroom and never returns. Maggie is crushed and almost broke. She rationalizes, however, that she will use Pablo as the villain in her novel.

Cut to Slack Cardinal, a poet, environmentalist, commercial kayak guide, nine-tenths impotent alcoholic, and one-time CIA contract agent in a small jungle town, where he finds it difficult to get a drink in a tavern because his bar bill has been long unpaid. A group in the tavern consists of the town's crooked mayor, the American Ambassador, American Senator Chuck Walker, Walker's nymphomaniac wife Gloria-May (called Glo) and their entourage, including flacks and Secret Service agents. Walker is a former gung-ho shoot-em-up army colonel from the Vietnamese War who is now running for President of the U.S. Glo talks to Cardinal and agrees to take a kayak trip with him. Cardinal gets in a fight with the crooked mayor and knocks him to the floor with a bloody nose before he passes out from too many drinks. When he wakes up he's surprised he's not in jail, but learns that Walker didn't want him arrested ("'Don't touch that soldier,' Walker had commanded."

Somewhere along the line we get the idea that Slack Cardinal's real name is Harry Wilder, but later we learn that it's Jacques Sawchuk, also called Jacques Cardinal. Wilder is a character in the book he's writing. When we connect Jacques with the man the literary agent was writing to, and with Maggie's romance novel protagonist, we begin to see the Importance of Being Jacques.

Aside from being rather confused by this time, I also found the similes too distracting. In just a few pages we have the glitter of McDisneyland, Zeus's angry bark, agents of the imperialist raj, having a day like the Battle of Stalingrad, and Falstaffian labours.

Gloria-May at times seems the most interesting character of all. At one time she's so worn out she "could fall asleep having an orgasm." She calls her husband Dick Do-nothing, leaving her little choice but to "take a good book to bed or a vibrator." She and Maggie, kidnapped together, get to be friends, and when Maggie tells her that a review of her last romance novel said it "started off too hot and went limp," Glo comments "Been there, honey."

The revolutionaries-kidnappers at first wear masks so that Maggie and Glo will not be able to identify them later, and their leader, Halcon (Spanish for falcon), hardly speaks. But Maggie ultimately recognizes him, so he takes off his mask. It is Pablo Esqivel, who made love to her while stealing her money. Since hope springs eternal, he now tells her "'you have won a place in my heart. You are, to me, a woman not merely of outer beauty but of great inner beauty . . .'" Maggie shows herself to be a pushover. "Her wrath had much abated. She would be better able to forgive his crimes if she could believe he had acted with benign motives." "She wondered if this had been his typical blarney. Yet she had felt that pressure against her groin; they had both been aroused." As we all know, when a man gets "aroused" with a woman, it's because he has genuine feelings of love and respect for her.

Perhaps Maggie's changing feelings are the reason she believes that he was born to lead. "Somehow he had whipped this ragtag band into a bumbling version of the merry men of Sherwood Forest." I didn't see where the author had demonstrated that Halcon was any kind of great leader, and "bumbling version" doesn't seem to help.

There are a lot more twists in this story, some of them rather predictable, and a lot more adventures. The language has its good moments, but for the most part struck me as pedestrian, and at times unjustified. When toward the end two important characters disappear, and we are told that a number of people "had claimed to have seen them (visions akin to sightings of the Virgin Mary)," I go into a state of denial.

Some people may like this type of story and style of writing. I don't.

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, March 2003

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