|
From Magic City Morning Star Book Reviews Title: The Pink Room Always willing to review a book about Maine, or by a Maine author, LaFlamme's novel offers both. The author is a crime reporter and columnist with the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine. This, his second novel, is set in Aroostook, Maine's northernmost county. But the story line deals with a subject not often discussed in "The County," as it is known locally; and that is quantum physics. Before I lose most of you, let's see if I can get you back. Please trust me when I tell you that you don't have to understand quantum physics in order to follow the story. The author assures us that most of the science portrayed in the story is real and, since I don't want to have to go back to school in order to write a book review, I'll just have to accept that. It's sort of a bizarre story, but then quantum physics is sort of a strange science. The setting is in the fictitious town of Mulberry, said to be a mountainous region near the northern tip of Maine, inhabited mostly by French Canadians. I'd place the location in the St. John Valley, an area I've become familiar with over the past few years. This is substantiated through some of the real places said to be nearby, such as St. Agatha, Frenchville, Long Lake, and Route 11, to name a few. I'm not sure that Route 11 was the best reference, since the author at one point talks about one of his characters taking a tote road from Route 11 to a secret location on Long Lake, which is primarily accessed through Route 162. While it might be plausible for him to find a tote road leading to the lake from Route 161, or from US 1 to a northeastern location on the lake, I can't see that it would be possible for him to take a tote road from Route 11 that wouldn't cross Route 161, and probably Route 162, before reaching Long Lake. But perhaps I'm being picky. That's the problem with real places; people like me can pick away at them. Getting back to the story, the author sets the stage in the prologue, which tells of strange occurances and uncharacteristic behavior on June 21, 1912, but we don't remain in that time period beyond the prologue. As the story itself begins, the protagonist, Jonathan Cain, is walking down a lonely northern Maine road on a dark summer night. His peace is broken by the arrival of a car, in which are two federal agents, who know who he is despite the fact that he had been in northern Maine for less than an hour. The agents take him to see their boss, Benjamin Rathbun, an ambitious man whose career is sliding. While the agents are among the first people we are introduced to in the novel, and one of them remains throughout most of the tale, they don't really do much to advance the story, serving more as a potential threat, waiting in the background. Nevertheless, Rathbun become a major character in the novel. He shows up again and again, and the author has taken the time to develop his personality, but I'm not sure why. I don't really know what the problem with Rathbun is. LaFlamme does a nice job of developing his character, making the reader care about the man, even to the point of feeling outrage over the way in which he is treated by his superiors at Langley, even while feeling dismay over his lack of ethics. It's not the character I disliked, but perhaps that his character was overdeveloped for the purpose in which he ultimately served in the novel. The story isn't really about Rathbun, it's about Jonathan Cain, a successful author of horror novels. Why he was walking down a lonely road after midnight, I'm not sure, but he had come to live in an abandoned house built by Theodore Currie, who was once the world's top physicist. He came to live there, not by accident but because he knew that Currie, an expert in the field of quantum physics, had devoted the latter portion of his life, before his suicide, to bringing his daughter back to life. His agent believed that he was there to write a new novel, but that wasn't his purpose. Cain, you see, had recently lost his wife, Kimberley, and was hoping to learn the secrets that would permit her to be with him once again. So that's what it's about, and it's effective, reminding me of a story from another Maine author: Stephen King's "Pet Sematary." Overall, LaFlamme tells a good story. If, like me, you're someone who normally ignores prologues, you might want to at least skim through this one. Don't bother getting to know any of the characters in the prologue however, since you won't see them again, but it does serve to establish some important background for the story to come. The author uses a limited third-person narrative throughout the novel, changing viewpoint characters from chapter to chapter, giving the reader the opportunity to view the roles played by each of the central characters from their own perspective. It's an intriguing story, mixing science with horror, and involving government agents, local cops, eccentric scientists, and an accumulation of interesting people, a few of whom seem not to serve any useful purpose insofar as moving the story along. But somehow, it still works. The story moves along and the reader stays with it to the end. That's what a story is supposed to do.
© Copyright 2002-2006 by Magic City Morning Star |
