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2011 Book Review #55: The Art Thief
Title: The Art Thief
Author: Noah Charney
Genre: Mystery/Heist
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: Three seemingly unconnected art heists turn out to be intricately linked in an overly-complicated plot studded by far too many completely flat characters.
Thoughts: I never quite decided how we were supposed to feel about at least half the characters in this book.
I've written before about the issues of trust between an author and a reader. I start a book with the assumption that a writer knows what s/he's doing, and will willingly suspend disbelief with the trust that in the end, the author will make everything clear. If, however, enough mistakes are made, I stop being able to believe that the effect being created is the one the author intended.
There are far, far too many characters in this book. I was never clear who the protagonist was, if there was one. I think there may have been as many as four antagonists, but I'm not quite sure about that, either. Most of the characters were exceedingly flat, yet still so poorly drawn that you couldn't decide whether you were supposed to like them or not. Take the incredibly fat, gluttonous (as he reminds us over and over and over again) police inspector. He's portrayed as clumsy and gauche and none too bright, but in such a way that you never decide whether he's supposed to be a Dogberry or a Columbo. Is he faking it? Or is he really this useless? Or there's the incredibly obvious author-insert (went to the same schools, worked at the same places) who's apparently screwing a betrayed, deeply wounded art thief. Neither of whom is ever particularly developed, so when you get to the shocking revelations, you're just vaguely baffled.
Pacing, too, is abysmal. He chops apart scenes and interweaves them in a way that would be appropriate to the climax of a suspense novel--cutting between three different action sequences, where each location gets a page and a half before the next switch. But he does this all the time. We're at an art auction thinking about the theory of auctions, we're in a museum that's being broken into, we're at dinner with clueless inspector, we're still pondering about how auctions work, the guards are all missing!, now let's order dessert. What?
The plot is labrynthine. It might have been clever, except by the end I'd completely lost patience. Basically, everyone double-crosses everyone and no one is who they seem. Which would have been more interesting if we'd cared about a single character or if anyone of them had gotten more than a paragraph worth of shorthand development.
I've been hanging around enough editor and agent blogs that I can't help but wonder what it was that they saw in this guy. I think I know though, which is the real tragedy.
The dialogue is hopelessly, awfully wooden. However, in three or four places, his characters go on multiple-page monologues that are brilliant. For a few brief, shining pages, you care. Not about the plot or the characters or any of that nonsense, but about the art itself. The author is a professional solver of art thefts, you see. And when he's discussing his field, he's fascinating. Not only that, but each monologing character actually has a completely different voice. It's the only time there's actual character. He can't write dialogue or description or action, but the man does an information dump in a way that makes you regret the story beginning again. What I want from this guy is nonfiction. Give us a history of Western art in the voice of the professor. Tell us about famous art thefts in the voice of Marty Stu. Explain the world of auctions through the fictional curator. I'd actually happily buy any of these books.
Just, for the love of God, stop trying to write yourself into the DaVinci Code.
Author: Noah Charney
Genre: Mystery/Heist
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: Three seemingly unconnected art heists turn out to be intricately linked in an overly-complicated plot studded by far too many completely flat characters.
Thoughts: I never quite decided how we were supposed to feel about at least half the characters in this book.
I've written before about the issues of trust between an author and a reader. I start a book with the assumption that a writer knows what s/he's doing, and will willingly suspend disbelief with the trust that in the end, the author will make everything clear. If, however, enough mistakes are made, I stop being able to believe that the effect being created is the one the author intended.
There are far, far too many characters in this book. I was never clear who the protagonist was, if there was one. I think there may have been as many as four antagonists, but I'm not quite sure about that, either. Most of the characters were exceedingly flat, yet still so poorly drawn that you couldn't decide whether you were supposed to like them or not. Take the incredibly fat, gluttonous (as he reminds us over and over and over again) police inspector. He's portrayed as clumsy and gauche and none too bright, but in such a way that you never decide whether he's supposed to be a Dogberry or a Columbo. Is he faking it? Or is he really this useless? Or there's the incredibly obvious author-insert (went to the same schools, worked at the same places) who's apparently screwing a betrayed, deeply wounded art thief. Neither of whom is ever particularly developed, so when you get to the shocking revelations, you're just vaguely baffled.
Pacing, too, is abysmal. He chops apart scenes and interweaves them in a way that would be appropriate to the climax of a suspense novel--cutting between three different action sequences, where each location gets a page and a half before the next switch. But he does this all the time. We're at an art auction thinking about the theory of auctions, we're in a museum that's being broken into, we're at dinner with clueless inspector, we're still pondering about how auctions work, the guards are all missing!, now let's order dessert. What?
The plot is labrynthine. It might have been clever, except by the end I'd completely lost patience. Basically, everyone double-crosses everyone and no one is who they seem. Which would have been more interesting if we'd cared about a single character or if anyone of them had gotten more than a paragraph worth of shorthand development.
I've been hanging around enough editor and agent blogs that I can't help but wonder what it was that they saw in this guy. I think I know though, which is the real tragedy.
The dialogue is hopelessly, awfully wooden. However, in three or four places, his characters go on multiple-page monologues that are brilliant. For a few brief, shining pages, you care. Not about the plot or the characters or any of that nonsense, but about the art itself. The author is a professional solver of art thefts, you see. And when he's discussing his field, he's fascinating. Not only that, but each monologing character actually has a completely different voice. It's the only time there's actual character. He can't write dialogue or description or action, but the man does an information dump in a way that makes you regret the story beginning again. What I want from this guy is nonfiction. Give us a history of Western art in the voice of the professor. Tell us about famous art thefts in the voice of Marty Stu. Explain the world of auctions through the fictional curator. I'd actually happily buy any of these books.
Just, for the love of God, stop trying to write yourself into the DaVinci Code.
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I actually only read it because I left my book at home by mistake, and this was one of the few left on the office shelf I hadn't already read. It was kinda this, Rabbit Hill(???), or a book in Korean about the palaces of Seoul.
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(I'm amused how much overlap we seem to have in our list of things we've read.)
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