Customer Reviews

Poe Shadow the Air Ire Anz Sa

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

It is difficult to be overly critical of "The Poe Shadow", as Matthew Pearl's illumination of the last days of Edgar Allan Poe's life makes for a fascinating tale. The extent and detail of Pearl's research is evident - this is clearly a labor of love - and the author deserves full credit for his diligence and for his efforts in updating the historical record. The problem is an uneven pace that, while riveting in parts becomes tedious in others and, despite being a unique and often gripping window into the life of an American genius, tends to drag beyond its initial appeal.

"Shadow" tackles Poe's mysterious death in Baltimore in 1849 at the young age of 40. While fiction, the author goes to great lengths to remain true to the historical record, while uncovering and disclosing new facts to bolster his own theory surrounding Poe's ill-fated plans to travel from Richmond to New York in his final days. Told through the journals of the fictional Quinton Clark, a young and well-to-do attorney, the narrative is written in the vernacular of the period - a style that takes some getting used to and definitely requires more attention from the reader than the typical pop thriller. The story opens with Clark's chance observation of a burial, notable in its scant attendance and absence a grave marker. The burial, of course, was Poe's, but the contemporary press was kind to neither the author's work nor the circumstances surrounding his death. Clark, a fan of Poe's works and sometimes correspondent, vows to find the real life inspiration for Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, detective extraordinaire and hero of a number of Poe tales, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". By finding the real Dupin and enlisting his help, Clark figures the truth behind the author's demise will be uncovered. This leads to a convoluted tale of deceit and deception from Baltimore to Paris, set in rich historical detail and an authoritative cultural backdrop.

Like "The Dante Club" before it, this is an ambitious and refreshingly unique novel, a welcome change from the typical thriller/mystery fare. It would have benefited from some additional editing, tightening the plot and streamlining a bit of the minutia. "The Poe Shadow" may not be for everyone, but it is nonetheless another notable effort by the extremely talented Matthew Pearl, and reason enough to look forward to his next novel.

I recently read and loved Matthew Pearl's THE DANTE CLUB, so I grabbed THE POE SHADOW as soon as I saw it. The new book is to be admired for the artistic risks taken by the author in an era when few artistic risks are taken, but, alas, it just isn't the achievement that his previous literary historical fiction is.

In this outing, Pearl has taken up the very real confusing and thus mysterious circumstances of the early death of Edgar Allan Poe at age 40. Pearl has given Poe an obsessive fan, a young, affluent Baltimore lawyer, Quentin Clark, engaged to the perfect socialite, who is abhorred by the error-ridden, sensational accounts of his hero's unexpected death in the local media of 1849. Clark decides to investigate. Realizing that he is no Dupin, Poe's famous detective character, Clark goes to France to find Poe's real life model. Instead, he unwittingly opens a Pandora's box of French intrigue that returns to America with him, including the person he is sure is Dupin's model as well as a con-man impersonator. There ensues, as Clark risks losing everything, by turns the fiancé, the job his inheritance and his life, a competition to reveal the truth behind Poe's death.

For those still in the thrall of THE DANTE CLUB, THE POE SHADOW presents a problem because it is entirely told through Clark's unrelenting first person narrative. We are stuck with his voice, his myopic grasp of things and his naiveté. You want to kick him in the pants sometimes. Then there is the problem of Baltimore: the setting never becomes a character or imbues character as Boston does in the first book. It's just so much pavement under the action. The red herrings are bloated beyond relief, making what can be deduced as the truth as light as a feather. The last problem is, you really need a recent reading of Poe's stories, and perhaps of his presence in American literature to appreciate the plot engine of this book.

Pearl's central inspiration is great. It just got lost in the details.

I enjoyed THE DANTE CLUB so much that halfway through it, I decided to buy Matthew Pearl's next novel, sight unseen and reviews unread.

In retrospect, this may have been a bit hasty on my part. In THE POE SHADOW, Pearl's choice to revisit the genre of historical literary mystery seems a bit forced. But before going any further, let me hasten to add that THE POE SHADOW contains many rewards. It gives a gritty and realistic description of the Baltimore of Poe's time, there are many amusing episodes, and the writing and mood are often beautifully wrought.

The bugaboo lies with the characters and plot. Our protagonist and narrator, Quentin Clark, is motivated by an obsession to clear the name of Edgar Allan Poe after the writer's death. This obsession is NEVER BELIEVABLE. It isn't logical, nor is it compellingly drawn. Now add in the fact that Quentin is also a gullible ninny who is prone to fainting spells. Mix in a creaking plot that takes a while to get moving down the tracks, and you have a tale suffering from bloat; it would, however, have made for a fine short story or novella.

Because of Pearl's prodigious skills at depiction and his obvious research, I'm rating THE POE SHADOW a bit more favorably than perhaps I should. Nonetheless, I suspect that I will still read Matthew Pearl's next work... AFTER taking a spin through its reviews.

As a fan of Poe, I was drawn to this book. However, this book is tedious. I find that the most I can read at a sitting is about ten pages. It has a virtually meaningless plot told by even duller prose. It could have been improved by cutting about 300 pages on the editor's floor and duplicating Poe's prose expertise--the short story. Do yourself a favor and read some of the original work of Edgar Allen Poe. I rate this a 1 star because Amazon has no zero stars.

I'm glad that I borrowed this book from the library so that I didn't feel compelled to finish it because I paid money for it. Although, I DID finish the book (I'm just weird that way). It was slow and ponderous at the beginning AND at the ending. I was truly happy to be done with it today so that I could check it back in and move on to some GREAT fiction!

Disappointing. When Dan Brown blurbs your book, is that a good thing? Not in this case. Pearl's a better writer than Brown, but still the book feels like a ripoff. Pearl's been researching the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and has turned up a few interesting secondary facts no one noticed before. But instead of presenting his research in academic fashion, he folds it into a novel, where Poe's death is solved in 1851 by three fictional characters: a Baltimore attorney and two competing French detectives. Rambling and strangely lacking in suspense, Pearl's writing makes a modest effort at 19th-century phrasing and vocabulary, but can't shake all its modern idioms. His actual theory of Poe's death, once we finally reach it, does manage to be interesting and tightly written. But 80% of it is copped from the work of another writer, John Evangelist Walsh, who published his theory under the title "A Midnight Dreary"--a slim little book that manages to be more clever and engaging than Pearl's, even without the benefit of invented characters. Although Pearl's theory sounds a little less farfetched than Walsh's, it also ignores some of Walsh's evidence. And while both writers contend that the borrowed cane Poe had with him when he turned up half dead at Ryan's Tavern in Baltimore was in fact a sword cane, only Walsh gives us a reason Poe might have needed a weapon.

I'm not sure that people who aren't Poe fans will have a reason to read this book ... and people who are Poe fans will be annoyed by Pearl's failure to live up to Poe's literary standard.

The book is a curious blend of historical facts, social commentary, and contrived mysteries that left me wondering why I continued to read it to the end. I was thoroughly annoyed by the time I finished it and concluded that I had wasted rather alot of time (as did the main character)with an obsession to find an answer to a mystery that has no solution and that attempts to make more of a brilliant poet's end than is worthy of the lyricism and mystery of his work and life. I learned a great deal that I didn't know about Baltimore in the 1840's, although not enough to explain the many mysteries created (or perhaps contrived) in this book. It was as if the author found so many interesting facts about the time and place of Poe's death that he felt compelled to include them regardless of their relevance to what was the main theme for the book.

The main character in this ponderous book, Quentin Clark, seems to be the fictionalized persona of the author who must have been frustrated by his findings in researching the last weeks of Edgar Allan Poe's life. Is this a mystery about the last days of the life of Poe? Or, is it the story of a young man's dissatisfaction with his banal life, career, and friends and family and who is seeking to defend a kindred soul? Is it a search for real people in Poe's fiction? Is it about Baltimore politics, society, and interesting characters? Is it about mental breakdown? It is all of this and yet not a satisfying mix of any.

The main character's obsession with Poe is never quite clear. At various times it seems to be linked to his parent's untimely and sudden death, his father's pressure on him to follow the law, his boring social life, and his family, friends, sweetheart and society's expectations of him. As much as anything Clark seems in search of a reason to run away from his staid life, and justify his departure and failed quest to restore the reputation of Poe. He remains unapologetic to those who stood by him through his selfish search for himself through what is really a pretty contrived mystery.

Perhaps because there is no great or solvable mystery, the author confuses readers by adding characters from Poe's fiction, French political intrigues, slavery, Baltimore politics, and the local familial connection to Napoleon through an illegitimate American nephew. Violent encounters with mysterious people ensue to create mysteries that have nothing to do with Poe. Fictionalized Poe characters are put into life forms to add to confusion and all the while one wonders if Clark's seeming mental breakdown is supposed to mirror Poe's final days.
The main character's obsession and seeming irrational behavior seems almost an autobiographical depiction of the author's frustrating efforts to find a satisfactory answer to the mystery of Poe's end. Unless you are obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe's last days and the times (rather than the man himself or his writings) I would not recommend this very long and ultimately unsatisfying novel.

Maybe this book has some good points, but it moves so unbelievably slowly that you'll be wishing you bought the abridged version. There is murder, chase scenes, love interest, mystery, but all of these are short scenes which are overshadowed by the main character's constant thoughts and reflections and poring over of uninteresting newspaper articles. He thinks about the same things over and over and over, and by the extremely boring ending you really don't even care how Poe died after all. If you have a decent memory, you will be exhausted from hearing the same material gone over again and again. For the most part, what is not dull is very predictable.

Just for the record, I abhor fast-paced books with no depth of characters, made for people with no attention span, believe it or not. Yet I believe there is a difference between depth and tedium and this book is the latter.

The author also mixes the language of the 19th and 21st centuries in confusing ways which will be very noticeable and jarring to people who read 19th century literature.

Pearl has done an admirable amount of research on his topic, his depictions of life in mid 19th century Baltimore are compelling and engaging. He has a good imagination for stories and events, but his failings as a writer are overwhelming in this work. I am amazed that so many other reviewers liked it!

I was eager to read The Poe Shadow because I greatly enjoyed Pearl's first book, The Dante Club. I was immediately disappointed with the writing in The Poe Shadow. It was so surprisingly poor, that I went back to re-read some of "Dante" to try and figure out how the two books could be so different. There seem to be two major reasons: Pearl's inability to create and animate entirely fictional characters, and his failed attempt to write in the style of the mid-19th century and in the manner of Poe in places. Using fictional characters, the first person, and writing in period style are perfectly fine and would have been terrific ideas for this book, but Pearl is not a writer up to the task.

In Dante, the main characters are real, historical people. Pearl's greatest strength is his thorough research and his ability to depict real, historical people, places and events. In Shadow, the main characters are fictional and the story is written in the first person. Pearl shows himself to be unable to create well developed fictional characters, and his first person renderings of internal states and thoughts are quite amateurish -- a short example from Shadow; "My mind circled vigorously around what I had learned." Oh please.

I found the writing to be shoddy throughout. Descriptions of historical places were lovely, but scenes depicting the fictional action of the story were rendered in a careless and often confusing manner making it difficult for the reader to visualize the unfolding events. Pearl must not think visually about his scenes, because sometimes he describes things that cannot happen, or people fail to respond to things that should be screamingly obvious to them. Pearl attempts to write in the manner of the 19th century by exclusively using un-contracted forms, by horribly overusing the perfect tense, and by excessively wordy and flowery language. Had not contractions been invented before the 20th century? I seem to remember lots of them in Shakespear. The perfect tense is formal and not that common in actual dialog, people talking together do not used the same flowery and stilted language that appears in written documents, even in 1849.

Writing is a skill which I hope that Matthew Pearl will undertake to acquire. Please, Mr. Pearl, go take some good courses in creative writing so that we can all enjoy the products of your thorough research and bountiful imagination.

Being a Poe's fan, I was excited to find this book. I am an avid reader but I have not been able to finish it. Annoying characters, slow and tedious plot,repetitive. It takes more than 100 pages to get something going. I was close to drop the book before that but I kept on reading, with the hope that something good will come. Sadly, it was not worth. The main character seems too dumb to breathe while the rest have almost supernatural powers, being able to fool the whole world. Maybe Poe died of desperation after he realised what mistake he made hiring this guy as his attorney. That would certainly explain it. A huge disappointment.