The Night Inspector (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Rating:
Summary: Night Inspector both haunting and lyrical
Review: Frederick Busch has given us a heady mixture of emotion, narrative and history in The Night Inspector. This is a powerful novel, a gripping tale of a hero who is damaged emotionally as well as physically. William Bartholomew is a civil war sniper whom fate has punished with a hideous face wound, forever hidden behind a papier-mache mask. The title character of the book is the then for gotten author, Herman Melville- Bartholomew's new friend- who lives a twilight existence as a customs inspector. Melville and the Phantom-like wander a bleak Victorian New York City, drinking heavily and visiting sights of depravity in the old city. Interspersed with the narrative, the masked protagonist's mind keeps wandering back to his days in the war, and the grisly but efficient assassinations he made on behalf of the Union side with his Sharps rifle, prior to his disfigurement. This is a fascinating adventure, written by an excellent storteller. Atmospheric, moody,violent, and sometimes bawdy, this is a novel well worth a few night's reading.

Rating:
Summary: Insightful, brilliant work
Review: It has been over a month since I finished Night Inspector, yet it continues to resonate with me, and I think about the main character, Billy, often. Busch provides great insight into Billy's experiences and life, and his will to continue on, as so many wounded men have. The book jacket describes Billy as limitlessly cruel, but I think that is an unfair description. I would describe Billy as limitlessly complex, facing the cruel circumenstances of war it's aftermath. Many men have lived with horrible physical loss. Some survive, some barely live. The plot was not nearly as important to me as the meditation on character. The Victorian language was fascinating, but the viewpoint inside his mind was completely modern. This is not an easy book, but a very rewarding and well imagined book.

Rating:
Summary: How shall I kill thee, let me count the ways.
Review: This lyrically written novel is dark, grim, cruel, bleak and just plain ugly. It's akin to reading poetry about a nuclear waste site or a slaughterhouse -- if that's your cup of tea, you'll love this profusely bloody tome. Busch is adept at describing in graphic detail the many ways that the bullets of an assassin can assail the human head. His protagonist is so hideous a human being that Busch had to disfigure him grotesquely and then involve him in a futile humanitarian gesture for the reader to sympathize with him: neither worked for me -- Billy it utterly and unredemptively odious although he has the olfactory sensibilities of a bloodhound and the night vision of an owl. The female characters struck me as one-dimensional women of easy virtue and the graphic detail of the visit to the Tenderloin was tasteless, pointless and loathesome beyond belief. The only character in the novel worth the read was Melville and the dialogue at the outset seemed as if Busch was too intimidated to be his mouthpiece. Gradually, Melville begins to round out and the suffering of this genius at the lecture by England's greatest hack, Charles Dickens, seemed truly poignant. I loved the beauty of the style of Busch and the vividness of his descriptions but I hope his next work does more than articulate mankind's utterly hopeless condition. It takes little imagination as an author to cast darkness upon life and real talent to shed new light upon it. While I admire the author's creative risk-taking in the plot of this tale, Busch inspects the night with his intellect and then leaves his worthy readers in a state of even greater darkness. Of what real value is this work to those of us seeking a glint of illumination in the great, black, cosmic void?