Customer Reviews

Logan In Overtime

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I'd read Whale Music by Paul Quarrington and loved it, so when I spotted "Logan in Overtime" I gave it a go. I never laughed out loud for so long since losing a number of tickle contests as a kid.

I'd always known that Goalies were a little strange - my perspective being old enough that I'd known a couple of kids who would play without masks or padding. They were nuts. Logan is such a goalie - nuts.

The premise is that Logan is a fellow with an alcohol problem and some minor dementia. He believes that space aliens (are there any other kind?)are out to get him. He is also a semi-professional goalie in a hockey league with a minor problem. They have no overtime rule for their play-offs. Everyone plays until the game is over (kind of like European soccer, I guess).

The team he plays for is mentioned in a book by the same author, "King Leary" which is a lot easier to find, let me tell you. In fact, I'd be very interested in finding a copy of "Logan" if that were at all possible...

LOGAN IN OVERTIME, written by Paul Quarrington, is not lacking in ambition. It aspires to the magical quality achieved by W.P. Kinsella in his baseball stories, and to the large, often bizarre cast of characters seen in the novels of Dickens and Irving. But LOGAN is a mess, a slight, sometimes amusing riff on the sport of hockey that achieves nothing more than the creation of a nostalgic feeling for Quarrington's far better, more fully realized novels. In WHALE MUSIC and CIVILIZATION, and the autobiographical THE BOY ON THE BACK OF THE TURTLE, Quarrington mixes the odd with the realistic, creating memorable characters that come to life not only because of their eccentricities, but because of Quarrington's very palpable fondness for them. In LOGAN, his characters feel half-finished, coasting by on their oddness, and not creating any real empathy with the reader. It's not the subject matter: Kinsella achieved a far greater story with his similar IOWA BASEBALL CONFEDERACY. There, as in LOGAN, unusual, somewhat magical events are mixed with a story surrounding a single game, but Kinsella balances his mystical-realism with a flair for fully-functioning characters that exist long after the tale is ended. Here, the effort is half-baked, as if Quarrington read Kinsella's novel, changed baseball to hockey, and hoped the rest would fall into place. Sadly, he fails.