Visible man

摘要

When Alfred Knopf paid a reported $4.2m for this thriller in a two-book deal, the publishing house gambled recklessly. The author, a professor of law at Yale, had written seven non-fiction books, including "The Dissent of the Governed", "God's Name in Vain" and "The Culture of Disbelief", but not a single word of pub-lishable fiction. He was not even a particularly gifted writer. His non-fiction indicated, and "The Emperor of Ocean Park" now confirms, that his prose is competent rather than inspired. But if enjoyment is the test, Stephen Carter earns his advance. He not merely holds your attention, he stimulates it for all 657 pages, though not for the expected reasons. This is a thriller without thrills. Its storyline is even more convoluted than the plots of John Le Carre's spy stories, and it is riddled with preposterous whodunit machinations involving a box secretly buried at night in a graveyard, a message hidden in a child's toy and clues embedded in chess stratagems. It is, frankly, hard to give a fig whether the hero-narrator, Talcott Garland, or his murderous rivals first solve the central mystery: the meaning of a death note left by Garland's father, a judge of rancid conservative views who dies in menacing circumstances sometime after a public scandal puts paid to his nomination to the Supreme Court.