The Lincoln Lawyer is a strange one for me. My feelings towards this book can be best summed up as - well, I was enamoured with it until I wa2.5 stars
The Lincoln Lawyer is a strange one for me. My feelings towards this book can be best summed up as - well, I was enamoured with it until I wasn't.
This was a VERY slow one for me - I read the first 60% in about a week, then I just...stopped. I took a HUGE break and I'm not even sure why. I got into it all right, and I liked Connelly's very matter-of-fact, direct, simple style...until I didn't. I don't really know what changed, but something did. Perhaps this book is just too long? The punchy, no-nonsense style works for a very intense, dramatic book with lots of twists and turns, but frankly this book had too many pages and too few twists and turns to sustain this kind of pace. Therefore, instead of feeling quick and explosive, it was a damp squib, utterly bloodless.
Essentially, it's a by-the-numbers legal thriller. The LA setting invested me to start with, but it's not remotely palpable beyond the odd name-drop of a place - "Boulevard", "Ventura" etc. The main character is a schlub with a conscience (of course he is) and, for all the blurb's promise of him being a "sleazy defence attorney", Connelly keeps everything very black and white by making his opponent, despite being a prosecutor, also a total sleaze and ensuring that, though Mickey does his job, he does it without any relish. He also doesn't do anything particularly controversial or dramatic. There is nothing original about The Lincoln Lawyer - sleazy rich boys, platonic prostitutes, an ex-wife he still loves, a daughter he never sees. You've seen all this before, and Connelly doesn't even seem to be TRYING to add anything new.
The fact that it says "Mickey Haller, #1" up there should already give this away - there's zero sense of danger. Sure, so Mickey occasionally appears like he might be up on a murder charge or that he's pissed off the wrong person, but he's not exactly going to die, go to prison or get disbarred. This is where the punchy style totally fell flat. It should have made the pages fly and instead it just robbed the weak and unoriginal plot of any emotional or dramatic impact. For instance, when Haller figures out (quickly, so this isn't going under spoiler tags) that Roulet isn't the "innocent guy" Haller thinks he is, I don't care, because Connelly didn't give me any reason to care about Roulet's innocence or guilt. It's just a standard legal story - Haller takes a case that should be simple, turns out it's not, somebody he loves dies, gets in too deep and then pulls himself out with the help of minor characters we've seen before.
Yet I can't quite drop the rating all the way because there was SOMETHING in those first pages that kept me turning them. There are good moments and I enjoyed the minor characters like Lorna (where did she go?!), Raul and Gloria. This seems like it's crying out for a film adaptation (I'm not surprised that there was one) because it seems to be begging actors to breathe life into the paper-flat characters, deliver the quick dialogue, set designers and directors to illuminate the Los Angeles setting and a half-decent scriptwriter to flesh out the basic plot. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for Connelly. ...more
I read this through screenshots on tumblr. That is a) probably piracy and b) the most modern way I've ever read a book. I feel like a true teenage hipI read this through screenshots on tumblr. That is a) probably piracy and b) the most modern way I've ever read a book. I feel like a true teenage hipster. Those people who are worried about Kindles ain't seeing nothing yet.
There is nothing remotely enjoyable about "Dark Places" and still I loved it.
Gillian Flynn really must keep writing, in the words of Camille from "ShaThere is nothing remotely enjoyable about "Dark Places" and still I loved it.
Gillian Flynn really must keep writing, in the words of Camille from "Sharp Objects", "until [she] can count on her last days on one hand", because crime fiction is a lonely place for a feminist with a potent hatred of cliché, and she is a dark shining light.
Let's start with Libby Day. Oh, God, how I loved Libby Day. Gillian Flynn takes hold of the "surviving female victim" trope and makes it into something dark, utterly realistic and yet original. Libby is a victim, and we don't need to talk about whether the novel or the author defines her as such, because Libby defines herself as such. Flynn does not shy away from the fact that Libby has lived through a truly horrendous event, but she doesn't ever make it look pretty or glamorous. Libby is totally selfish and broken and, no, there's nothing sexy about that. Libby is not the strong and feisty female survivor, nor is she the fawning Mary-Sue. She's a weak and depressed kleptomaniac, lazy and childlike, who falls back on her reliable victim status as a way to cover up for her total inability to do anything. She threads the narrative with dark humour that I relished - she complains that, if another girl hadn't had her face burned off in a fire that killed her entire family, she might have been able to live off the sympathy money a little longer, because she'd have more. She plays on her victim status whenever she gets mocked or called out (because "nobody laughs at a victim.") She insists that, at the creepy crime fare she attends, she wanted her family to have the biggest gore booth because "my dead people were the best."
And yet Libby is wonderful, too. She's flawed, yes, but it really was Libby who kept pulling me back into the narrative. She’s darkly comic and totally realistic. Her arc is palpable and great, a woman who patches herself together and gets there in the end, slowly and painfully but with a kind of grim determination you wouldn’t expect from a woman who, by her own admission, has no stamina. She's my favourite kind of heroine, and I won't forget her.
The pain in "Dark Places" is real. That's what killed me. Everybody hurts, really hurts, and I hurt with them. Patty's woes over losing the farm, Libby's kleptomania, Ben's desperation to "be a man" when he's not even old enough to know what that is. Reading this is like being trapped in a slow-closing vice. It just squeezes tighter and tighter and tighter and then it begins to hurt and it hurts more and more and more but still it won't stop. I couldn't stop reading this and, just as I did with "Sharp Objects", I marvelled at the intensity and the joy of Gillian Flynn's talent. It’s all in the writing. Even after "Sharp Objects", I underestimated this in a stupid way, because I didn't think it was possible for Flynn to hit me so hard in the core again. She did. I felt so bad for Patty, going to be dead by the end of the day and STILL trying to do the right thing, STILL trapped in a situation that seems utterly hopeless and trying to find something to do about it when we know nothing will change the fact of her death and, perhaps even sadder, Libby’s total abandonment.
Again, though, the surprising highlight of "Dark Places" is the minor characters that flit as shadows around the corners of the dark dirty backwater they all inhabit. A minor character who had a far larger impact on me than I was expecting would be Krissi Cates, the young girl who grows into a washed-up stripper, who accuses Ben of child molestation in 1975 and gets tracked down by Libby in the present day.
She's lying - that is obvious immediately - but she gets both a raw, honest and sympathetic portrayal from Flynn. In the 1980s, she's an attention-seeking little brat, but Flynn gives a very realistic and harrowing look at the Satanic panic of the ‘80s, where "well-meaning" parents and shrinks manipulate (consciously or not) their children into accusing innocent people. Krissi's description of how/why they did it and the eventual karmic retribution on her and her family is deeply moving. It might have been fun – “like a sleepover” – but Krissi gets what she deserves in the end. That’s without even going into Crystal or the mysterious man in the cowboy hat and his scary, spine-chilling section towards the end.
But I can’t give it five stars because, frankly, I thought it totally failed as a mystery.
Not that I guessed it. Though I did, and I’ve honestly never felt so bad about foreseeing a plot development! I just was like, oh, I’m so sorry, you tried so hard, you did everything right, and then I came in and guessed what was going to happen before it did using totally ridiculous methods and thought patterns…(view spoiler)[it was because I guessed that Patty was probably involved in her family’s demise, because I know how fond Gillian Flynn is of the maternal characters who are not just bad mothers but profoundly horrible people (though Patty is not horrible, and her wish that she could take it back as she died almost made me cry). With this in mind, I picked up quickly on that mentioned-and-then-dropped Angel of Debt, and boom! The mystery came together. (hide spoiler)]
The plotting of this book is, let’s face it, not good. It kills me to say it because I LOVED Gillian Flynn’s knotty, dark, literary writing. I really loved it! But in the plotting area – let’s be generous and say that it was lacking. It was just so contrived, so much, especially when you remember that the 1980s segment takes place in a SINGLE DAY. I’ll give this to Gillian Flynn – she did capture the element of feeling that your whole life was going to shit in a very short space of time, the intensity of being trapped and wanting to get out and not knowing how. It kind of works when you are swept up in the pace of the novel (despite it not being brisk exactly), but the second I started reflecting on it, the whole thing pretty much disintegrated in front of me. It felt almost like Flynn was writing without an outline and, so, when it came to the part in the 1980s segment when she had to stop building the blocks up and start knocking them down, she just went back and ‘patched up’ the plot strands.
I know it’s a feature of Flynn’s grim Southern world that everything that does go bad will, and there will be nobody to help you when it does. But let me break down how she ‘explains’ the fact (red herring) of Ben being accused of Satanism and child molestation:
Exhibit #1: Ben has a minor ‘relationship’ with Krissi Cates, a grade-school girl, which is obviously him trying to be nice and her misinterpreting it through her crush. He even, at one point, gets an erection in front of her grade-school desk. Explanation: Ben was just being a good brother, wandering through his sisters’ school on impulse to see if they were okay, and then started thinking about his slutty and pretty nasty girlfriend Diondra while on his little trip. This brings out the erection, at which point he runs into his teacher (well, everything that does go bad will, right, Gillian?) AT WHICH POINT he turns around and happens to see that the desk he’s in front of belongs to (DUN DUN DUN!) Krissi Cates.
This bugged me because to me it’s so contrived. Okay, so a teacher meeting up with you while you’re trying to deal with, ahem, a situation? Awwwwkward. But it could happen to anyone (well, not me, I’m a girl, lucky me). A teacher then finding you with an erection in front of a grade-school girl’s desk? Which you just happened to wander to, apropos of nothing, even though you know she already has a crush on you and she’s already (unknown to you) accused you of Satanic child molestation? Um…
Exhibit #2: Ben makes jokes about Satanism on the day he ‘kills’ his family. (view spoiler)[Oh, no, you really must understand, Ben was just trying to impress these guys (hide spoiler)]…how? For what reason? It’s never that well-explained and it just seems like Flynn knows she has to connect another dot here.
Exhibit #3: BEN MAKES RITUAL ANIMAL SACRIFICES! Well, I can’t wait to see how Flynn gets Ben out of this one (if she indeed does): (view spoiler)[she indeed does. Oh, no, you really must understand – sure, Ben was there, but not only was he totally pushed into it by his psycho girlfriend (what a bitch!) but he didn’t want to do it in the first place and felt totally scared and creeped out by the whole thing even though, yes, he was on drugs at the time! But you must understand, reader, he didn't mean anything by it! (hide spoiler)]
(Huge spoiler follows) That's without even getting int the (view spoiler)[fact that Diondra murdered Michelle THE VERY SAME NIGHT that Patsy, in a totally disconnected series of events, decided to kill herself through the Angel of Debt so that her children could have the life insurance money). (hide spoiler)]
Yeah, these things didn’t sit right with me. They didn't feel like you wanted to zip through the pages and shut Ben up. No, I was just beginning to wonder if I believed in the Devil (I don't), because he clearly had it in for Ben if he did. Ben seemed almost like a character in a – but still, Dark Places is highly recommended. Though only for a day when you are feeling particularly happy. ...more
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