About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
by Nathan Larson
Akashic, July 2012
256 pages
$15.95
ISBN: 1617750794


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In last year's THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM, a title that might have invited the unwary reader into expecting a genteel murder-in-the-library mystery, we first met the anti-hero who calls himself Dewey Decimal. The time is the near (perhaps too near) future when an undefined series of catastrophes on Valentine's Day have reduced the city to a shell, its population reduced to a relatively few desperate, feral individuals who defend themselves and what they have left with an animal ferocity. Overseeing it all is an organization that enforces a certain imitation of order - private military contractors ŕ la Blackwater, working at the behest of the remnants of a military-industrial complex gone barking mad.

In the earlier novel, Dewey killed a corrupt DA; now, six weeks later, he's gone back to tidy away loose ends. What he uncovers is evidence that a prominent politician was implicated in the murder of a Korean prostitute, evidence that the deceased DA had been using as leverage against the senator. What ensues is impossible to summarize, but leads Dewey and the reader, breathless in his wake, on a nightmarish journey through a city that is both instantly recognizable and hideously transformed.

There cannot be a more unreliable narrator than Dewey. He says so himself. His memory is full of holes and what memories he has may have been artificially implanted when he was being rejigged at Walter Reed hospital, where he also believes he received various surgical modifications, including a facility with languages, that accounts for his otherwise inexplicable knowledge of several Korean dialects. If the doctors at Walter Reed were tampering with our hero, they seem to have also endowed him with the ability to endure extreme physical abuse while maintaining a preternatural accuracy with a variety of firearms. What they did not excise, however, was his conscience.

Dewey is a stone killer and his body count is very high this time out. But unlike the usual psychopathic hitman, Dewey knows that those he kills were human beings, anonymous though they might have been inside their hazmat suits and visors. Dewey's shield is his endless supply of Purell™, a liquid to which he resorts before and after any violent encounter and to which he ascribes magical properties. It is what keeps him alive, that and his mysterious pentagon-shaped pills, and he pays his dues by never failing to acknowledge Purell's right to the ™ even when he is reduced to slapping on a generic substitute.

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM is somewhat more political than the previous volume and lets the reader go a bit further into Dewey's past. But the plot is, if anything, even less coherent than the first time and will leave some readers scratching their heads.

That doesn't matter. What makes this series unique is Dewey himself. Yes, he is a killer, but one with a Code, as he says. More to the point, one with a voice and a rhythm that is pitch-perfect and completely compelling. In a disintegrating world, he remains a constant energy, a focus of determination, perhaps the last human being and we will follow him right to the end.

Whatever happened on that day now called The Occurrence, its after-effects are nowhere more evident than in the waters that surround Manhattan Island. It is the one thing that absolutely terrifies Dewey and horrifyingly, he falls into the East River: "To call this seething mass 'water'. . . opaque wetness with the awful complexity of wine, I detect meat, some sulphur, mercury, and an iodine/pus finish. Like sipping a liquified corpse." For someone who has a horror of contagion and survives on Purell™, nothing could be worse. But still he does not give up. He achieves a remarkable moment of clarity while floating in the noxious sea: "In a sense, I am relieved. One of my greatest nightmares, being submerged in this river, has now come to pass, and as of this moment, I am still kicking back. I still possess the will to continue. Disease may overtake me but I will push on until I can go no further."

It will not constitute a spoiler, I think, to reveal that Dewey has not reached that end point by the end of the novel. He is battered, has lost more than he even knew he had, but he is still alive and, we hope, ready to resume the struggle in another book. I, for one, can hardly wait.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2012

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]