"My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her."
- Colin Harrison, Bodies Electric
Thriller - "My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her - not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But I'm as weak hearted for love and greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy for the sex - of course that was part of it." Jack Whitman is the first-person narrator and this is how the novel opens, an opening Raymond Chandler and his fictional private-eye Phillip Marlow would appreciate.
Sociology - "And it was equally clear that if the woman had been dressed in a pair of tight jeans and cheap red pumps, she might be a New York-born Puerto Rican whore addicted to self-destruction, carrying a purse filed with rubbers and wrinkled bills and selling herself to all comers at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, a woman who, despite providence's gift of fine bones and large, deep eyes, was forced to live life faster and harder than was ever meant." The author has Jack Whitman make pointed, telling and sometimes scathing observations about society on nearly every page.
Psychology - "Morrison, second in command in the Corporation, the man everyone feared . . . . Morrison had lost half a leg and most of a hand as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, having survived, he had the confidence of five men. Combat had shown him that we are all merely walking bags of meat, and once a man has decided that, all manner of brilliant scheming becomes possible." Indeed, Harrison's novel is a study in corporate psychology. One could argue Bodies Electric should be required reading for anybody contemplating a career in the business world, particularly the American business world.
Cross-Cultural Collisions - "What is certain is that as Liz waited for the light, a silver BMW with tinted windows . . . pulled over and someone poked the short metal barrel of a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol over the electric window and started shooting. . . . Liz was right in the way of it." Liz was Jack Whitman's beautiful young pregnant wife and both Liz and her seven month old daughter in the womb were killed by a Harlem gang's bullets. New York City aka the Big Apple as the American melting pot on speed. Harrison loves the city (and he said so directly in an interview) and captures NYC's hyper-energizing hum.
The characters play for high stakes, as well they should, since they are each caught in an emotionally-charged net of circumstances and faced with life and death choices. Regarding our main character, Jack Whitman - he sees the twenty-something cinnamon-skinned beauty with her little four-year-old girl on the subway in two ways: as Madonna and Child and as an exotic sexually-charged object of desire.
In the aftermath of his tragic loss, the magnetic pull is too powerful to resist (one way to think of Whitman's attraction is in terms of Carl Jung's archetype, the "anima"). Whitman hands her his business card and offers help, which turns out to be the first step in a series of events swirling himself and others in unexpected and sometimes dark, violent directions. For my money, Bodies Electric is a modern classic.
American author Colin Harrison, born 1960, has had a lifelong fascination with New York City - the energy with which he writes about the Big Apple shines through on every page.
Comments
Post a Comment