Rating: 
Summary: TEDIOUS REALISM
Review: You really have to understand what this novel is about to fully appreciate it. There are people who jump out of airplanes and climb cliffs and jump off bridges tied to oversized rubber bands. Some people and cultures idealize these people and undeservedly credit them with enlightenment. Hence the caricature of a California Surfer and films like Point Break. A lot more of these people take up rock climbing and moutaneering pursuing the same spirit, especially in Europe. What the laiety fails to appreciate is that these are expensive and time consuming pastimes casually affordable only to the wealthy and the leisured. The rest of us have to assume an existential and obssessive existance, often confused with bohemian lifestyle, in which the person's life revolves around surfing or mountain climbing or parachute jumping, and most of the life is spent scraping up resources and planning that next attempt on Everest. Whether we work construction saving every penny for that next trip or sit on Wall Street hoping for the clear weather in the window of our vacation is only an accident of birth. This novel is about precisely this set of people who live to climb, except they climb roofs for the lack of the Alps. However, the book is not about Extreme Lifestyle, it is about Extreme Realism. The people in it are almost life-like, as life like as the forty something engineers from Brazil and Sweden who shock us by making pilgrimages to the US for skydiving or Harley festivals that we associate with suburban fifteen year olds. The protagonist is a female electrician who in a more romantic novel would have been cast as a tomboy, but this story lacks uzis, short hair and leather jackets that Hollywood would have used for props, instead we have this gawky, if not plain woman, who is the type of girl who leads younger boys into trouble and for that reason is reviled by adults, especially in this case, where the boy winds up dead. The rest of the characters are typical of the scene: There is a mysterious Yogi, to whom climbing is his life's path, there is a wealthy dilettante who shelters everyone, there is a believable psychopathic villain... The striking feature of this novel is an unembellished realism of its protagonists. The story would have crossed the line into greatness and immortality if it did not give everyone a bad childhood to justify who they are in the story. Unfortunately this novel is probably ruined when the author writes it as a classic gothic novel. All of the elements one associates with the 17th century gothic romance are there: Lovers, an overhanging curse, personal secrets, past tragedies, and a totally contrived convention that everyone in the story is related to everyone else and they don't know it. Same thing happens with this story, down to a climactic ending, which does not serve the story either and makes Vine's attempt at Gothic form all too obvious.
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