Book Report: 'Heaven Lake' by John Dalton

Heaven Lake

John Dalton

ISBN  0743246357

The premise is rather simple and is based on a real-life event in the author’s life; A young American man in Taiwan receives a proposition from a wealthy businessman. Travel to a remote region in mainland China, marry a young woman, bring her back to Taiwan, then annul the unconsummated marriage allowing the businessman’s son to marry her. It actually makes sense in the context of fragile and complex Chinese/Taiwanese culture/politics.

The young American, Vincent Saunders, is in Taiwan to open a Christian mission in Toulio (Doulio) a small city about one hundred-fifty miles south of Taipei. He starts out proud, confident and driven, but cultural circumstances and naiveté soon wear him down to a point where frustrated, angry and lonely, he succumbs to temptation and dramatically sullies his reputation and position. Destitute, ashamed and directionless he accepts the businessman’s dubious offer.

The book then takes up a tale of odyssey; planes, trains, buses, oxcarts, through deserts, heavily polluted mining regions, barren wastelands.  As is to be expected he travels through and among an exotic, seldom written about backdrop, meeting and struggling with people of a culture even more foreign to him. His destination, remote and rugged Urumchi, China. The titular Heaven Lake is nearby, like the young woman herself, a beacon of breathtaking beauty in the midst of a harsh and isolated region west of Mongolia.

As with any good odyssey, there are many strange and interesting characters along the way, thugs, thieves, drug dealers, farmers, and con-men. His quest eventually leaves him penniless and desperate, and of course he falls in love with the young woman he is supposed to be acquiring for his benefactor. (though everyone involved is in on the scheme, they still insist on traditional courting ritual, dowry, etc.)

Though this is the nut of the story, it really gives little away about the book itself. A good odyssey is not a whodunit, it’s all about the journey.

And this is where the author reveals a mastery. His descriptions of completely unfamiliar people, places and culture flow comfortably. Never over-explained, never too sparse, the reader finds himself learning just enough to be able to move on to the next scene. The reader doesn’t need to know much at all about the places and cultures beforehand since they are being described expertly through the eyes and words of another outsider, Vincent. We see what he sees, think what he thinks, and figure things out only as best he can.

And as with any odyssey, we suffer, then grow with the protagonist. He started this adventure a completely broken soul. The exotic and unfamiliar terrain, the slow, archaic pace of life in northwestern China allow him time to be reborn, to reinvent himself, honed by the strange and often bizarre surroundings and events. His beasts to vanquish along the way are not those of ancient Homerian tales, but of faith, bureaucracy, tradition, language and harsh terrain.

(I found myself so engrossed in this strange landscape, that between reading sessions I would zoom in on Google Maps to many of the locations described. I’ve never done that with a James Patterson or John Kellerman novel.)

It is the writing that makes this journey unique, it shows polish and efficiency, yet tells us everything we need to know.

 “Several hours into his journey he began to feel the wry pinch of his predicament, all the commonplace symbols that were unavailable to him, the railway signs for instance, with their columns of glinting white characters he couldn’t read. Nor could he make out the steward’s garbled announcements over the train’s PA. He leaned across the aisle and told a well-dressed, responsible-looking gentleman that he was on his way to Toulio for the first time and was unsure when to get off the train. From then on, after each announcement, he turned and sought the man’s guidance. Not yet, the man said with a single, restrained shake of the head. Not yet. Not yet.”

Through this voice we discover not only the vast cultural differences between east and west, we find within the people a deep, common familiarity. We can understand their struggles, their wants and desires, without understanding a word they say. We recognize community, toil, family and love, as well as sympathy and sacrifice.

More important than the story itself, the book is simply a true pleasure to read. The word-craft is smooth, nearly flawless. The dialog is simple and direct. The characters are believable, flawed, yet ultimately salvageable. You’ll find yourself rooting for Vincent, though often cringing at the same time. He’s not the golden hero you may want him to be, he’s too much like ourselves.

The Author, John Dalton, teaches writing at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

His books are available online or in book stores.

For my writer friends, please click here for his essay on becoming a writer.

Movie Time: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

No spoilers!
This was my birthday present this year, I got to choose a movie.I met up with Angel and Adam in Fenton after I got off  work.  There wasn’t a big crowd at the cine-plex, Thursday I guess, being a light night.
I’d read the book earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, the entire trilogy actually. It was  long ago enough that I couldn’t recall exactly at what point in the epic trilogy storyline each of the three books started or ended. I easily recalled events, characters and plots, but not the exact chronology. Adam and Angel had not read any of the books. I was really curious about what they might think of it.
Another thing that I should point out, I only see movies in a theater rarely, one per year or less. It takes a really, really potentially good movie to get me to sit in a theater for several hours. Most movies I’m willing to wait for the pay-per-view or DVD. That way I can pause, replay, set the volume, etc. I really don’t like theaters.
That being said. . .
The opening credits/theme was James Bond-ish, bold music, a slime covered woman dancing seductively, not really relevant to the story at all, stylish, but too long. By this time we’d already suffered through several ads, a half dozen previews, and various warnings about cell phone usage. I wanted to get on with it. (Where’s fast-forward when you really need it?)
The movie’s actual opening scenes set the time and place well, Sweden, winter, cold, dark. The two protagonists, Lisbeth and Mikael don’t interact with each other for nearly the first hour of the movie. We follow them individually though. This is in line with the book. We quickly gather that Lisbeth is a troubled, damaged, but a brilliant freak abused by just about every man that has ever been part of her life. She has a certain moral code, but it’s one of her own making, and one that is certainly honed from a very rough life.
Mikael steps aside from his co-publisher role at Millennium Magazine after a scandal involving stories he wrote about a wealthy industrialist. We’re told he was set up, deliberately given bad information, but public trust in journalism is fickle. Another damaged, vulnerable hero. This part is covered very, very quickly and not in depth. The book had the luxury of explaining it in more understandable detail.
He is hired by an old, retired industrialist, a foe of the one that messed up Mikael’s career. The plot is laid out. A teenage member of the wealthy Vanger family went missing several decades prior, the old man suspects someone in the family killed her and disposed of her body while they were living on or visiting the isolated island compound that day. The Vangers are a completely dysfunctional lot, former Nazi’s and sons/daughters of Nazis and all hermits, nags, wife-beaters and asses. Completely unlikable people.
This is essentially a locked room mystery as the girl disappeared while the island was even more isolated than usual due to a truck accident that blocked the only bridge to the mainland for much of the day of her disappearance.
Meanwhile Lisbeth’s social worker/guardian suffers a stroke, and her case is handed over to a cruel, abusive bureaucrat. In short time he forces Lisbeth to perform increasingly cruel and violent sex acts in exchange for her allowance.
Here’s the next thing you need to know. Though this storyline is in synch with the book, the book’s description of these acts is tempered by brevity. The book leaves the reader to imagine most of it. The movie SHOWS us the acts in graphic detail. If you are at all squeamish about nudity and sexual violence on the screen, you will definitely squirm during these scenes. And there’s more than one of them.
Personally I think this could have been handled much, much better. This was too overt, too violent. The point could have been made with a lot less flesh and blood. I’m pretty liberal minded about this sort of thing, but even for me much of it was simply awkward, gratuitous, and worse, just plain unnecessary.
What took several chapters in the book, Vanger telling the story of his damaged family, one by one, took up only a few minutes in the movie. I don’t know how they could have done it much differently though, the cast of characters in the book is nearly as cumbersome as that in ‘War and Peace’. Add to that the names being Scandinavian, Germanic, etc. the poor, typical American brain doesn’t quite grasp them all as well as if they were Smiths, Jones, etc. I found that in the book there were several names with peculiar dots and lines over some of the letters that I could not even mentally pronounce. I asked Angel about this segment and she said she eventually tuned it all out, finding it impossible to keep up with all the names and who was the son/daughter of whom.
In all though, the movie doesn’t stray much from the book. The visuals are all stunning, the musical score very good, if not quirky. Some of the background narrative, as I pointed out earlier, is sped up to a dizzying, confusing pace. Even though the movie is nearly three hours along, a lot is left out, or incomplete in context, by necessity. (in the book we know more about the golf club that Lisbeth uses as a weapon.) The book was very detailed and precise. In the book there were several plot line distractions to keep the reader from guessing the outcome. Some of these, like the whole Nazi story line, were trimmed in the screenplay to the point where it probably could have been left out altogether in the movie. Novels, especially good ones, do not adapt very well to the big screen. Short stories and novellas work much better. Fewer characters, fewer subplots, etc. In this case this movie could have completely done without several family members. The last twenty minutes or so, dealing solely with the destruction of the industrialist that disgraced Mikael, could have been taken out and left for a sequel. As this movie goes we find out who the bad guy is and what happens to him, which is what we are actually led to care about, well before the movie ends. As I recall in the book, these two plots were more parallel, with both ending at about the same point at the end of the book, I could be wrong. But the movie deals primarily, with only a few exceptions, with the missing girl, then comes back to the industrialist only after that plot line is complete.

Summary:
I absolutely loved this movie. The things I point out, like the gratuitous sex, only actually take up a small fraction of it and can be put into that perspective. The rushing through of certain areas is completely tolerable, if you’ve read the book.
So that’s what I recommend. Read the book first, then you can enjoy the ride without fretting the details as to which mumbled line of thick-accented dialog is crucial and which isn’t. Reading the book will NOT spoil this movie. The movie actually takes you there, puts you in the cold dark Nordic air, the damp back alleys, the torture pit. It gives you credible, believable face and voice to the characters, as the casting in this thing was absolutely dead-on.
Angel and Adam said they enjoyed it, but I got the impression they didn't quite catch some of the nuances, the bits that made the book a superstar. I couldn't get them to say much bad about it at all, except for the slight discomfort as mom, dad and son sat together during some really, really graphic sex scenes. Angel was pleased to find out that there are plans to bring the rest of the trilogy to the big screen.  She's got a dark side that she pretty much keeps to herself, but she does enjoy a good dark story about really evil people. She scares me sometimes.
Though with certain caveats, I recommend it. It's the best movie I've seen in a theater this year. Okay, it was also the only movie I sat through in a theater this year, but still I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, it would be just as good on a living room flatscreen , three hours is a really long time without an 'intermission'.