Frames of reference

In 1977, I saw the movie Turning Point. Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft might have been the stars for most people, but Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne were all I saw in that movie. I know full-well that the dancing was enhanced by camera angles and lighting, but I was absolutely enthralled.

Later that year, I saw Gelsey Kirkland and the American Ballet Theater perform Swan Lake. (Baryshnikov was out sick the night I was there.) Kirkland was as fantastic as Baryshnikov had been in the movie. No camera angles or movie lighting needed. I was once again enthralled -- even though I remember Kirkland landing un-ballet-like on her butt during one of her exits.

Thus began a decade when I saw a lot of dance. And loved most of it. And found nearly all of it interesting.

There was another performance of Swan Lake, a few years later, that helped me learn how good Gelsey Kirkland and the ABT were. A well-reviewed local company performed. The music was recorded, not live. The dancers were probably well-rehearsed and dutifully trained. But there was no life in the performance. Neither the dancers nor the recording of a famous orchestra could come close to what I loved about dance.

Books, Ken, books! Remember?

Oh, yes, books. Banker Mary gave me Turquoise Girl by Aimée and David Thurlo for Christmas. A couple months back, I got around to reading it. I was hesitant because last July I'd read and written about the Turlo's book, Red Mesa. I wasn't pleased with it.

One of the reasons I hadn't liked it was probably the inevitable comparisons with the novels of Tony Hillerman. The Turlos and Hillerman write about Navajo police officers and the desert southwest of Dinétah. The comparisons are all over the cover of Turquoise Girl. Obviously the publisher thinks that hooking on to the Hillerman name is worthwhile.

If I'd never seen Gelsey Kirkland and ABT do Swan Lake, I might have appreciated the local company and their tape recording. If I'd never read Hillerman, I might have liked the Thurlo's books a bit more.

But maybe not. After page 25, I stopped remembering the typos and the awful word choices. Did these people not have an editor? or a proofreader? Don't they know that spell-check won't tell them that "thought" is not a substitute for "though?" And somebody ought to tell them about pacing. Speeding up narration and shortening sentences as the climax approaches is appropriate. But doing that in the middle of the book, only to slow down the story telling and then waltzing into the climax is not fun. It's rather like riding the downhill runs of the roller coaster with the emergency brake on.

I said after the first Thurlo book that I wouldn't go back to the library for another. The next time I have a hankering to read about Navajo police officers and the high desert, I'll reread a Hillerman.

Other opinions?

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• Publisher's web site for Turquoise Girl
• The Thurlo's web site
• A review from Mary of Many Colors
• A review by tfedge

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Hillerman successors

For the past 30 years, Tony Hillerman has been writing mysteries set in Navajo country at the rate of one every 2 or 3 years. To me it seems like he invented a popular genre featuring Native Americans as crime solvers. Other people have followed his example. Margaret Coel is the one I'm most familiar with.

Hillerman is 82 years old. His most recent book, The Shape Shifter, could well be his last. Becoming his successor as a "mystery writer of the Navajo" would be a big deal. Even being a Hillerman imitator could be something to brag about.

At the Northfield library recently, I saw a couple paperbacks in the mystery section by Aimée and David Thurlo. I picked up Red Mesa and brought it home. Like Hillerman's mysteries, this one is set in Dinétah (the Navajo reservation) and tells stories around a Navajo police officer.

The Thurlos, like Hillerman, are knowledgeable outsiders in Dinétah. They've created a good mystery story. But their telling of the story is not up to Hillerman standards. Special Investigator Ella Clah, headquarted at the Shiprock station of the Navajo police, is a single mother who had significant experiences in the Anglo world before returning home. It's probably not a fair comparison based on a single book, but Ella Clah is not as compelling a character to me as either Joe Leaphorn or Jim Chee.



The majesty of desert and mesa that Hillerman writes about with such passion is missing from this book completely. The Thurlos' story telling is sporadic: sometimes moving too slowly for me; other times jumping ahead leaving gaps in my understanding.

That characteristic shows up in the writing in other ways. Characters sometimes offer a lot more explanation than they would in a real conversation and at other times they seem to leave out important details. I don't need to be told, for instance, that as a suspended police officer drives off from home that her white pick-up only gets used for personal trips.

On the other hand, it would be nice to know where that police officer, who was on the job all day, heard the gossip about her family that is central to her internal dialogue at the end of the day.

In other words, this was a dissatisfying book for me. I was hoping to visit Hillerman-land with huge skies, stark beauty, stormy male rains, and reflective attempts to harmonize the old and the new in the course of resolving a mysterious and dangerous set of circumstances.

What I read in Red Mesa was a patchwork story about politics, clan rivalries, irrational, murderous revenge, and magic intuition full of unexplained developments, sinister unidentified forces, and hard to accept rapidly-changing loyalties. In some ways that might be more realistic than Hillerman's romantic vision. But the realism isn't matched by the narrative.

Next time I go to the library, I won't pick up another of the Thurlo's novels.

• Aimée and David Thurlo's web page
  
• A more favorable review of Red Mesa

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