Baker's Gold

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Summary: Dazzling storytelling --Powerful intrigue in the Northwest
Review: This book really won me over and took me in more deeply than anything I can remember reading in years. I honestly had a hard time breaking away from it and putting it down. It was like being on a train travelling through a lush, tropical landscape that keeps getting more spectacular and phenomenal the farther you go. From the first sentence to the very last, I was hooked and I felt as if the author had me under a spell. I fell in love with these strange and at time unforgettable characters, the graceful yet breakneck speed in which this story poured out, and how everything just enfolded. This is the first work of serious fiction I've come across with back-to-the-land type characters, some of them living in geodesic domes with leaking skylights, trying to make a go of it on 20 acres in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula until all sorts of hysterical zanniness, mayhem and a 40-year old deadly mystery consume their lives. It's funny, absorbing, wild, and intense, and the writing is crisp and riveting and at times acrobatic, packed with nifty metaphors the likes of which I've never come across that make reading this book a real joy. I once spent a month on Orcus Island in the San Juan's off the Puget Sound, somewhat in the vicinity of where this story is set. The author's descriptions of the Olympic Peninsula are so visual and sensual I thought I was almost looking at a snapshot of Orcus. I felt I could practically reach out and touch each fern and leaf in the forest and could see the flight of sparrows over the long rows of Douglas firs. I found it uncanny how the simplicity and beauty of his words could evoke such a detailed picture of the area. He is quite an artist and a naturalist with a deep love for unspoiled lands of the Northwest. This book is really one that everyone should read. It's dazzling.

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Summary: mastefful storytelling***high-flying metaphoricaljourney
Review: Whenever I watch a supreme talent like Jordan or Tiger Woods, I'm always amazed how fluid and deceptively simple they make everything seem. The same can be said for Baker's Gold, a fast-paced and dazzling high-voltage romp through the Pacific Northwest, an absorbing and readable gem that cleverly disguises itself as a mystery. Fluid and deceptively simple on the surface, this novelis like a sly little drug someone has slipped into your drink--it plays with different layers of your mind well after you finished it. If this is the mark of a fine writer, then I believe we are being treated toone here, What itis we're being treated to is not just another mystery. If that's what you're looking for, you can get that from any hardboiled mystery writer who can follow a tight, linear formula. Baker's Gold is extraordinarily different. It's a masterful high-wire act that sticks itself out on a limb, dangles you there before dropping you in places you've never been. It's that good. The search for gold by Baker, a lost and wounded soul in retreat, is simply a brilliant metaphoric journey for the lost treasure hidden deep in his soul, the gold buried in all of us we are either afraid or do not know how to access. It's also about the ability not to be seduced by a mountain of foolsgold that preys upon our desires daily. There are mor lessons that come out of this book than you are even aware ofand like buckshot, they hit you dead on. Like Yossarian in Catch-22, we only get to know Baker as a character with one name. He's just Baker. I don't know why--maybe it's the simple sound of the name, Baker--but if it was Joe Baker or Tom Baker it wouldn't have been as effective. Maybe it's partly due to the fact that Baker is like a ship adrift; he is not too terribly sure who he is anymore or what he's doing in a world as perplexing as ours which makes his search for himself and the gold so endearing. And like Yossarian, Baker feels he is the only sane one left in a world gone berserk, even in a spot as remote as a corner on the Olympic Peninsula where there seem to be more nutcases running around than on an entire wing of Bellevue. He's not especially clever or brilliant. He's just another human being trying desperately to make sense of his life on earth and yet he knows exactly where he wants to be--on 20 acres of land hidden away in Washington. What I liked about Baker and the people whoinhabit his world is that they want nothing to do with mortgages and credit cards and interest rates. They moved to the Olympic Peninsula to live as independently as they can, going at it with a creed of volunteered simplicity which is so refreshing. They don't have 9 to 5 jobs and most don't have jobs at all. You get the impression that these are people who know all about septic tanks and solar energy, wells, pumps, and generators, and the last thing they know anything about is getting involved in a deadly mystery. As Baker muses at one point, "the world was too screwy a place to lock horns with, and whenever he did he never seemed to come out intact anyways. It always turned into a battle that managed to get the bestof him time and time again, and he suddenly felt he had been tired of waging war with everyone over every little thing that popped up. He had returned to the land to find his life again, not to trample over it in search for stolen money that meant nothing to him in the first place." That Baker was once a highly touted quarterback was a clever move on the part of the author who seems to know this character like the inner workings of a Swiss watch. When we meet him,Baker is stumbling around,plauged with uncertainty and a past he can't shake. As the search for gold intensifies, we see him become more self-directed, quick thinking,and determind. It's as if he has taken a snap at the 40 yard line, ducking tacklers and ready to stick a 60 yard pass into the endzone with no time on the clock. There is a classic confrontation towards the end between Baker and a Dr. Bennett that is stupendous--we get a glimpse of how cool and dazzling he must have been on the gridiron. I can take your best shot, he seems to be saying with a cocky grin, and no matter how many times you knock me down I'm going to come up firing and if you get to close I'll shove it right down your throat. You gotta love this guy. There is some beautiful writing here, and the author is quite a talented storyteller as well. He is very much in command when delivering his pitches and seems to be having a lot of fun with it as well. But most of all, it's a hell of a great read. What I fear most about this book is that Hollywood will get its hands on it sooner or later. It seems inevitable and I know they will screw up the ending big time as well as the entire concept of the novel. Please, Mr. Cohn, do everyone a favor and do not sell out to Hollywood. Say no to Disney and Orion and Miramar. If you really have to sell it,let an independent take it on. They're the only ones working with kind of soul and integrity. For thatis what this novel is--a work of soul and integrity. Keep it that way. You can live without the money. Baker's been doing it for years.