Customer Reviews

The Silver Hearted: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a novel in lyrical prose, but that takes place in the extreme mists of fictionland. The unnamed narrator goes from one unidentified city to another. We have no idea of the story's timeframe, either, except it takes place at some time when money was specie, presumably sometime between 1850 and the `30s, because he uses a $20 gold piece. Probably closer to the end of that range. Except that there are helicopters and paper towels, but no wire transfers or letters of credit. WTF? Speaking of specie, his job is to protect an immense and immensely heavy treasure of 36,000 silver dollars for a consortium of gamblers and other underworld heavies. He's on a riverboat in a warzone with only a teenage boy to help him, so this may involve some complications. The consequences of failure don't bear dwelling on.

I think the idea is to create a free-floating story space outside of time and history. This is only partially successful; I did as much thinking about this stuff as I did about the story.

Equally annoying: our hero seems totally incompetent at what he's actually there to do. He's supposed to be using the treasure to trade, but does no trading. He spends all his time protecting the treasure. You can think of several good reasons why this might be so, but, instead, he lies to his boss and says everything's going swimmingly. Meanwhile, the treasure diminishes in bribes and daily living.

The narration, though very well written, is incompetent. Several times he leaves his first person narrator to follow other characters in the third. "Don't ask me how I know this," he says. That's cheating. If you can't tell a story in the first person, use the third. No law against it. Or "I found this out later." Which brings us to...

I don't know if this counts as a spoiler or not. I dislike stories where you can't tell if the first person narrator survives or not. On one hand, he's telling the story in the past tense, so you'd think he must have done. On the other, his situation in the final pages seems pretty much hopeless. Stories written by ghosts are cheating.

The relationship with the teenage boy goes nowhere.

I've ever read, and I hesitate even to hint at its storyline, for I'm pretty sure McConnell's imagination is larger than my powers of understanding. There's a narrator with whom we identify in a near-total manner, no small feat since his life is so different than our own. He's a wealthy scion of a great family whose trust fund has suddenly dwindled to a sub-zero balance, forced to find actual work. What he winds up doing is like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or Fitzcarraldo, a work of obsession involving the high seas, and the inland rivers snaking through a war-torn country, and the dirty port cities that service merchant seamen.

McConnell is a atylist who has sometimes been accused, unfairly in my opinion, of being unwilling to tell a story. What calumny! The story may amble a bit, getting from one exotic locale to the next, but along the way there are some riveting setpieces that heat up the action to an tense, scary boil even as they serve to widen and deepen the scope of the story. We all know that a broken up voyage, spent guarding a valuable treasure, has always been an allegory for life, and we turn to allegory, I sometimes think, in order to expand our understanding of our own lives into (what Baudrillard would call) a paroxysm... understanding through excess. In scene after scene, McConnell conjures up a universe just like ours, but with one difference, it's fictional. McConnell's narrative makes clear the absolute equivalent of pirate and merchant. So when we close the book, we return to our own neocapitalist existence with new eyes.

Our hero is forced to secrete huge amounts of cash money on his person, and his physical travails concerning the boxes the money is hidden in, convince us of money's true weight and labor. Each box weighs eighty-three points, easy enough to store on a bottom shelf, but when the shelf is three or four feet off the ground, you have to make your body unfold like a rose to hoist it up that high. We carry around this weight at our peril, and it displaces our bodily functions due to the extreme exigency of always watching it. Our hero doesn't even know how to get off the money trail, and the one thing that might distract him--love--is just around the corner and thus just out of reach.

The Silver-Hearted is a sumptuous ride through a nightmare, and it comes with all of its author's trademark wit and sexiness. Give it a try, you don't want to miss out on an extraordinary trip.

I am surprised by the glowing blurbs and the incredible publicity push for this book. This novel is reminiscent of the pulp action adventure novels that inspired The African Queen, though The Silver Hearted lacks even the stereotypical charm, delineation, and back story of stock characters such as Charlie and Rose. McConnell sets up a tough hurdle in the first chapter. It is quite difficult to develop sympathy for the unnamed narrator of this story who begins his tale by telling the reader he has lost the money from his trust fund (hmmm... like we all have) and then happens upon a treasure. The author is good at writing action and dialogue, the prose is sharp, but he is quite unskilled at developing fully fleshed characters or making his plot and themes entertaining for a reader. I found this one sorta dull.

Atmospherics, cities in code, heavy sighs, confused action; but no story to wonder about, no characters to like or loathe, no theme or point!

Readers will find it hard to withstand the author's intention to keep everyone in the dark. His writing is confused and indistict.

"A perfect work of art" Edmound White says on the cover. I wonder how much he was paid for those five words?

Book publishers are often their own worst enemies. They print such unbelievably glowing reviews on the cover that most books can never live up to them. This is a typical example. The disappointment after reading such reviews, and then the book itself, is doubled as you can feel cheated. A great idea for a story is dissipated through leaden dialogue and an increasingly boring narrative. I was less and less interested in the narrator's tale as it progressed and was very glad when I finally finished it. Dull.

In David McConnell's novel, "The Silver Hearted," a man must transfer trunks of silver coins from a ghostly ship where most of the crew are dead or missing, first to a mariner's hotel in harbor town, then upriver to escape encroaching anarchy. The protagonist is unnamed, cities are referred to by letters and the action takes place during an unspecified revolution, yet these mysteries are perfectly housed in the erotic and paranoid atmosphere of the novel. Everyone is a potential threat to man's coins, and part of the pleasure of the book is in his minute calibrations of the characters he must deal with, including an sentimental and obese ship captain who may or may not be responsible for the loss of the crew and a waif-like cabin boy who is at once, alluring and dangerous.

I loved the foggy, nautical atmosphere in the novel and read with a sort of adolescent fervor, as if i were devouring it under the covers late at night with a flashlight. And just as i might have done when I was thirteen, I tried to make the novel last longer towards the end by reading in smaller increments.

The book has another, very adult thrill: the writing is not just good, it's extraordinary. I recommend it completely.

David McConnell's beautifully written literary thriller is one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in a long time. Told by an unnamed narrator, set in an unnamed country, McConnell's story is an intriguing adventure story reminiscent of Joseph Conrad with comic touches of Graham Greene. This book is page-turningly suspenseful and also quite sexy. The narrator meets Topher Addison Smith and McConnell's description of him illustrates how every sentence in The Silver Hearted is lovingly crafted: "He couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen. He'd let a smattering of whiskers grow long on his chin. And the blond prickling of a moustache didn't look virile so much as childishly vain. Still he was big and might grow huge. His skin was sheet white, very strange in that climate. A healed break (I later learned) thickened the bridge of his nose, which gave him a slightly leonine air. In his short life his body sustained a lot of other damage. A V-shaped nick was missing from his jug ear. A messy vaccination scar was smeared on the skin of his man-sized shoulder. Another blurry magenta scar ran from his chest's smattering of pimples to his navel, which had the beard his elfin face couldn't grow. Even his nails were damaged, bitten to stubs around which pillowed blushing, gnawed- upon skin. His eyes, too, appeared damaged. Pale blue, they had dark flaws like missing shards." It's a perfect word-portrait of a young pirate. Readers with a sense of adventure will love this book.

Reading "The Silver Hearted" I was reminded of a long ago co-worker of mine. He was a Vietnam vet, a big, burly guy (former marine) who had led a life of adventure, varying careers, and change. He was also a voracious reader. He would sometimes lend me his books, which consisted largely of fiction in two genres:

1) Narratives set during the Vietnam War (or sometimes WWII) featuring actual battles and offensives tricked out with fictional heroes and lots of graphic, realistic detail (perhaps autobiographical)

2) Pulp novels set in a post-apocalyptic USA, with war and/or natural disaster stalking the land, larger-than-life protagonists, militia movements, civil war, and lots of graphic sex and violence

"The Silver Hearted" struck me as an unhappy blended variation on these genres, with a heavy dose of plot and atmosphere borrowed from old adventure movies like "China Seas", "Red Dust" and "Fair Wind to Java". Unfortunately, it's not as entertaining as any of the above books or movies.

"The Silver Hearted" is written in a dry, self-consciously "artsy" manner, composed skillfully enough save for the occasional misused adjective. The narrator's obsession with saving his fortune underpins the plot, so naturally much time is devoted to this; however, the descriptions of counting, packing, and moving the loot soon grow tedious. There's some homoerotic sexual tension between the characters, but the book is anything but erotic. Aiming at a "timeless" feeling, the narrative is unmoored from a lot of realistic detail, but it's not dreamy enough to truly satisfy and many passages struck me as dull and superflous. The settings and descriptions have the vagueness I always find irritating in sci-fi and fantasy writing. Actual names (misapplied) and archly made-up ones are mingled along with the archaic conceit of referring to somes cities by a single initial. There are jarring anachronisms (the residents of a besieged city watch TV, but the narrator makes his final escape aboard a wooden sailing ship!) A more focused setting would have underscored the action better and given the characters a stronger sense of reality. As it is, one wonders vaguely where they are from, where they are going and, indeed, why we should care about them. The ambiguous ending is less memorable than the author seems to intend. Overall, the whole reads more like a creative writing exercise than a finished novel.

In a war-torn city where residents are killing their pets so insurrectionists won't eat them, the protagonist of THE SILVER HEARTED is charged with transporting twenty-four unwieldy boxes filled with valuable coins to the City of Z. With this treasure in tow, he boards a ship filled with shady characters and sets out on nightmare adventure with danger at every turn.

It's not just the high stakes that makes this book spellbinding, but also the alchemic language--it's tight, precise, and gorgeous. Like the protagonist, we feel disoriented at the beginning, but McConnell renders this strange world beautifully and makes some very brave choices that really work.

The word "literature" is tossed around so carelessly these days that we sometimes forget what it means. In THE SILVER HEARTED, McConnell masterfully reminds us.

This very strange, irresistible novel is the finest update of the Conrad style I've ever seen, and the best "gay novel" in years. The narrator's extremely sensitive, unique style of telling his amazing story makes the book wildly exciting to savor, and I finished the book only wishing it would go on to the next stage, to be continued indefinitely. A really impressive accomplishment. Dazzling in the best way.