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Don't Spoil the Ending - Tinkers by Paul Harding

I'm about half way through listening to the Brilliance Audio/Audible.com production of Tinkers, so I'm as interested as the next listener in not having the ending spoiled for me.

The risk seems minimal, however, because author Paul Harding's first sentence informs his readers that the story begins 8 days before the death of its central character, retired high school guidance counselor and clock-repairer, George Washington Crosby.

From there the story moves backward and forward in time, much in the manner of George's deathbed hallucinations. "George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control."

In fact, the entire book is a stream of consciousness recollection of George's life and that of his oddball father, Howard, a "tinker" who drove a horse-drawn wagon down country roads and lanes, pedaling soap, needles, tobacco, and other household necessities. Periodically, Howard is beset by epileptic seizure's that tear his world apart and  prompt him to ponder life's mysteries.

The narrative shifts in time, changes perspective, omits quotation marks entirely, and returns again and again to George on his deathbed, as his last eight days of life run down like one of the many antique clocks he lovingly restored. Life itself, the author seems to suggest, is a complex clockwork of inter-related gears and springs, in which small motions are magnified and transfered across time. Sometimes the whole machine "whirs with brass logic," and other times faulty alignments may cause it to "squeak and gibber."

For George's father Howard, the clockwork mechanism of the universe periodically flew to pieces when his grand mal seizures transported him from his day-to-day world into an alternate existence in which he communed with nature, wrote poetry, and speculated on the meaning of life. While his family sat at the dinner table, their food untouched, waiting for his return.

Howard thinks of his epileptic seizures as bolts of lightning that, in striking him, cause the mysterious curtain of existence to be briefly lifted, allowing him tantalizing glimpses of what lies on the other side. Deep questions for an uneducated tinker to ponder, and not at all the sort of stuff that interests his bitter and long-suffering wife. The lightning metaphor is repeated throughout the book, and son George is even struck by a literal bolt of it as he builds the house in which we find him on his deathbed at the book's beginning.

This book barely saw the light of day, by the way, let alone winning a Pulitzer Prize eariler this year to the surprise of almost everyone. Tinkers is Harding's first published novel, and it was rejected by agent after agent and publisher after publisher. In the end, it was picked up by the tiny Indy publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, and sold all of 7,000 copies before winning the prize.

Though hardly a blockbuster, Harding's book became a favorite of independent booksellers, and through one of them was brought to the attention of Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, chair of this year's Pulitzer fiction committee.

I'm only half way through, but I'm loving it.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

From Denmark to Ireland by Way of Brooklyn

"The sky was swept of clouds when I noticed a figure bent over his broke-down 1950 Vincent Comet dream machine and cursing under his breath. I slowed on my bicycle, not thinking he'd notice. But he turned to face me on the narrow street. And with one look, he cracked me open like a safe and stole everything inside."

So begins Darling Jim, Christian Moerk's impressive debut novel, the Tantor Audio edition of which won the Audio Publishers Association's "Audie" award last May in the category of "Thriller-Suspense". It was up against some pretty stiff competition, including recent works from Greg Iles and Elmore Leonard.

Moerk is a 40-year-old writer, born and raised in Denmark who came to the U.S. for college, received a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, worked in Hollywood for Warner Brothers, wrote for the New York Times, and now resides in Brooklyn. He spent considerable time in Dublin during his days in the film industry, and he does quite a good job evoking the accents, slang expressions, and locales of modern-day, small-town Ireland.

Dual narrators, Stephen Hoye and Justine Eyre, worked hard for that Audie, and, like the author's, their evocations of Ireland are convincing. Raised in New England, Hoye studied and worked in London theater for 20 years. Eyre is a Nova Scotian Canadian by birth, spent much of her childhood in the Phillipines where she was educated at British schools, then trained in theater at McGill University in Toronto.

(Fans of vampire lit -- and who is not? -- may be interested to note that Eyre was involved in another male-female co-narration: the Books on Tape library edition of Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 best-seller The Historian, co-narrated with Paul Michael. She can also be heard reading the forthcoming vamp mash-up, Dracula My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker -- due in August from Tantor Audio and available on Playaway this Fall.)

Moerk's inspiration for Darling Jim was an Irish newspaper story about an aunt and three nieces found dead in the house in which they'd lived for months as shut-ins. From this gruesome starting point, Moerk imagines an irresistable vintage-motorcycle-riding, silver-tongued, blue-eyed shanachie or story-teller who leaves a convoluted trail of mayhem that must be pieced together by the novel's characters and readers alike. The book was first published in Denmark in 2007. The first U.S. edition was published by Henry Holt in 2009 and received very favorable notices -- a starred review in Publishers Weekly and raves from Booklist and The Washington Post.

The story is told in three parts that interweave an after-the-fact third-person narrative (read by Hoye) with two separate diaries written by two of the three sisters and read by Eyre. Each narrator does an impressive number of distinct voices and accents. Hoye's section is focussed primarily on a hapless but determined young artist and postal clerk named Niall. Eyre is especially convincing in her strikingly different renditions of the three sisters.

Typically for this genre, a goodly amount of the willing suspension of disbelief is required of the reader, but those willing to go along for the ride will be rewarded with an entertaining yarn, rendered skillfully for audio and justly deserving of its recent Audie award.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta