Conspiracy of Tall Men, A

Rating:
Summary: I can only hope not...
Review: Don't get me wrong, I definitely did not dislike this book. Fabulous first try. I love the writing style. The bits of information seemingly thrown in about each character (major or extremely minor) could have been tiresome, but worked for me beautifully in keeping me interested. Did you really need to know about Jack Evers' uneasy relationship with his adopted son? These are facts about a character who appears in about three pages of the novel! But it worked for me because you got a sense of a three dimensional person by a few lines of biographical history instead of twelve pages of unnecessary, dodgey dialogue or actions by this minor character. It gave me a sense of reality within context.
The plot, however, seemed not to be as strong. It lost a sense of credibility toward the middle and a developed a few flaws toward the end. The end itself I shook my head at, but then again, how do you put an ending to such an intentionally outrageous story and still have the faith of your audience? If Hawley tones it down a bit for us skeptics out there, he may actually convince some of us that at any time Teddy O. Waren may be seated next to us on a plane.

Rating:
Summary: atrocious
Review: The poor writing in this book is only "bested" by the poor plot development. I kept waiting for wit and originality, but was left (time and time again) with sophmoric prose and predictable cliche.

Rating:
Summary: Thriller/ conspiracy-theory satire will keep you up nights
Review: This book defies genre. It is at heart, a thriller in the manner of a Hitchcock man-against-dark-forces movie, but at the same time it is a satire of the 90s tendency to see conspiracies everywhere while at the same time a chilling & credible vision of one possible conspiracy. It is also a well-written book with a lot of funny observations about our culture & insights into human relationships.

To say this book is like a bad X-files episode is, I think, to miss the point - like criticizing Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" for being like a bad monster movie. As satire, it necessarily takes the elements of the conspiracy thriller and exaggerates them. What is so unique about this novel is that at the same time as it skewers this paranoid mentality, it sucks you into believing that the conspiracy played out in the book could/does really exist.

The book has a very postmodern feel, so if you like your fiction to be more traditional in writing style, this rapid-fire present-tense perspective-shifting style may turn you off. Given the subject of the book, I thought it worked.