A brilliant and gripping thriller - I think not!

"A brilliant and utterly gripping thriller, The Executor is the long-awaited new masterpiece by the author of the Richard and July bestseller The Brutal Art." Thus (and I do not mean "the commoner kind of frankincense" with "thus", but an even commoner thing done by publishers) is an unsuspecting reader enticed to obtain and read this novel by Jesse Kellerman. The front cover uses the same ploy declaring that "Kellerman is a master of menace". Having found its way to my hands how could I resist reading this book. And was I gripped? Did I feel menaced? No and no - a hundred NOs. The book was tedious beyond belief. It felt like the author used a hundred words to say what two or three words would have said so much better.

Jesse Kellerman is the son of Faye and Jonathan Kellerman. Both are thriller writers. I have read some books by both and enjoyed them. (Although the last one of Jonathan Kellerman I read was a disappointment. I wrote about it last September.) The fact that Jesse Kellerman is their son was another enticement to read this novel.

The main character in The Executor is a Harvard philosophy student named Joseph Geist who found it difficult to finish pers (= her/his) dissertation. Per (=s/he) had been writing it for some years and had become "if not persona non grata, then a white elephant" in pers Hall at Harvard. A bit like Jesse Kellerman going on and on and on ad nauseam.

This tortuously rambling story written mostly in past tense slips from one time to another with stories about Joseph's parents and childhood mingling with more recent happenings. This mostly past tense writing is interrupted by one whole chapter written in present tense and in second person singular. After that the writing returns to the first person / past tense for two and a half chapters when it switches again to the present tense / second person midway through a very, very, very long paragraph. The last chapter is written in first person and present tense. Who would not be confused!

It was a real struggle reading this novel; it took me longer than other novels, some with many more pages than this, to finish. There were times I was so frustrated with the style, the story, the number of words, the lack of real interesting engaging characters, I just could not go on. About half way through the novel as I sat thinking of the torture I was putting myself through an idea popped into my head. What if the writer is trying to bring Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment to the present day. That alone made me want to read to the end to see how these two novels would compare. As I could not remember much about the style of writing of Crime and Punishment I had to go and find my copy of it. Not finding it I started Googling and now I have a copy on my computer. (The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.) Just a few pages of it gave me the flavour of the style, the story and its setting, an interest in the character, and I had to stop myself from reading it all there and then: I had to finish The Executor first.

Crime and Punishment is not written as a first person account. There is a narrator who intersperses musings by the main character in inverted commas. This makes the read more interesting and easier to follow. The musings of the main character have a similar feeling to them as those of Joseph Geist in The Executor, only not so boring. When the whole book is written in the voice of one character and when that character is not a sympathetic one or well developed by the writer, the whole book falls flat. The novel is not redeemed by other characters appearing in it as none of them is really memorable or interesting in any way.

The Executor is not really a thriller as promised. There are murders committed by Joseph Geist. I suppose the first person ramblings are meant to express the state of mind of the protagonist, if it is possible to think of Joseph Geist in that light. And what of the second person episodes: they come at the times when some big change has happened or is happening: the moments after the first murder, the second murder and the hiding of the bodies; the break down, the hospital and the confession. In these pages Joseph Geist is looking at perself and telling what per is doing as per is doing it. "You could claim self-defense but look. Look at the carpet...." Although Joseph Geist is writing pers story while in prison as it appears in the final chapter, these passages, these moments and days of pers life are stilled in pers mind as happening in the present. This device certainly sets these parts of the story apart from the rest. However, while I was actually reading these passages I felt confused. The whole thing felt so contrived.

I think enough said. I must say I have enjoyed writing this. Made me look at the book a bit more and more critically than just saying: What a bore! However much I have enjoyed writing this, I will not start reading books that I know I will not enjoy just for the sake of writing reviews of them.