Some things are better left unsaid, so the saying goes.I personally disagree with that sentiment. While very few topics are considered “taboo” anymore, a few cultural taboos still linger; subjects upon which many writers still fear to tread due to its general unpleasantness. Cancer used to be taboo. So did adultery and homosexuality. Taboos succeed in creating an atmosphere in which feelings never get expressed and problems never get solved. Taboos generally make things worse.Pedophilia is, in some ways, still a taboo subject. It’s probably taboo for a good reason, as the word itself is cringe-worthy. It stops conversations dead, makes everyone feel uncomfortable, and brings to mind nothing but disturbing thoughts and images. It’s understandable why pedophilia is a taboo subject, but it’s also important to note that it’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Keeping quiet and turning a blind eye is what got the Catholic church in trouble regarding this issue, so it’s not an issue that can simply be swept under the rug anymore. Of course, tactfulness and discretion is always in order.Outside of memoirs and other nonfiction, pedophilia is not an issue many fiction writers are willing to tackle. The few writers willing to confront the subject matter often find ways of doing it subtly; bringing it up without actually having to bring it up. Those few writers who don’t tiptoe around the subject are often accused of being too “in your face” or “graphic”. It’s a tough subject to deal with in writing.Michael Connelly, in his riveting but disturbing novel “The Poet”, attempts to write about pedophilia without walking on eggshells. It’s graphic and horrifying and makes the reader naturally uncomfortable, which are the book’s strengths AND weaknesses. I consider “The Poet” a successful failure of a novel. To explain: Connelly uses the subject matter of pedophilia to create a taut, edge-of-the-seat crime thriller, something which he succeeds in doing. He also succeeds in creating a thoroughly unpleasant read, precisely because of the subject matter. “The Poet” is an excellent thriller, but it is not a fun read.Of course, I may be coming at this reading with a unique perspective, one that I did not have a year ago. Indeed, if I had read this book a year ago, i’m sure that may appreciation for this book would have been much different. What’s changed?Well, for one, I’m now a father.Prior to having a child, I never fully appreciated or understood how truly life-changing it was to become a parent, nor how completely in love one person can be with another. In my child’s face I see a perfect genetic blend of my wife and me. I see my past and my future, and I see a hope for the human race. I also now understand the intense feelings of protectiveness that inherently comes with parenthood. I would do anything to shelter and protect my little girl from the evils of the world.Pedophiles are the natural enemies of parents. They are a parent’s polar opposites: Whereas parents want to nurture and see grow, pedophiles want to defile and destroy. Whereas parents want to keep pure, pedophiles want to sully and contaminate.Prior to having my child, I was, perhaps, somewhat of a “bleeding heart” liberal and a Christian in my views toward pedophiles: maybe they CAN be rehabilitated and cured of their sickness, and it is the judicial system’s and the church’s duty to try. Pedophiles aren’t monsters, after all. They are still human beings, albeit flawed, and, most likely, victims themselves.Nowadays, to that I say: Bullshit.Pedophiles are evil and incomprehensibly so. Whatever possesses a human being to do something so ugly and inhuman to a child is beyond comprehension and beyond my sympathetic and empathetic capabilities. I don’t care if they were victims themselves. I no longer care or believe that they can be rehabilitated, because I would never allow a known pedophile---rehabilitated or otherwise---anywhere near my child. And, despite my Judeo-Christian upbringing and belief in tolerance and nonviolence, I would have no hesitation or guilt in defending my daughter, even if it includes killing a pedophile. It frightens me to say that, but it is true.In “The Poet”, one of Connelly’s characters, a seasoned FBI agent named Rachel Walling, expresses similar views to the protagonist, Jack McEvoy. He and the reader are, I suppose, expected to feel shocked and appalled by her statement. She is, after all, an agent of the Law. She is beholden to upholding the Law and supporting the basic moral tenet that murder is wrong and unforgivable, and yet she admits to having no problems wanting to put a bullet in the brains of a pedophile. I found myself surprised to feel no shock or disgust at what she was saying. I whole-heartedly agreed with her.There is a certain genius in Connelly’s writing talent that one is never sure how one is “supposed” to feel about anything in the book. There is no manipulation of emotions. He leaves it up to us, the readers, to bring our own sense of morality to the reading.Take the protagonist, Jack McEvoy, for example: He is a Denver journalist who, after the very controversial and publicized suicide of his older brother (the lead homicide detective of an investigation into the brutal murder of a young schoolteacher), stumbles upon evidence that the police originally missed that confirms that his brother’s suicide was actually a murder. McEvoy quickly does more research that reveals a serial killer’s trail across the country.While his investigative skills carry the investigation, the reader is never fully convinced that he is doing it for the right reasons. Is he doing all this to avenge his brother, or is he simply hoping to find that Big Story, the one that may finally get him a Pullitzer Prize and a higher-paying job as a staff reporter for a newspaper like the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times? At times, McAvoy seems like a good guy, just trying to clear his brother’s reputation. At other times, he looks like a self-aggrandizing asshole. Connelly refrains from making any editorial judgment.The killer himself is an interesting character study in duality. At once perverted and vicious, the killer’s life is gradually revealed in bits and pieces that are meant to help us understand, if not necessarily sympathize, with why he does what he does. From an objective standpoint, the killer’s life is a sad one, and he appears (like almost all pedophiles) to have been a victim of gross sexual abuse as a child himself.From a subjective standpoint, I didn’t give a shit. I hated him, and my hatred made me uncomfortable. It is not a side of myself that I liked seeing. Sadly, this discomfort carried over to the rest of the novel, tainting what I would have otherwise considered an excellent thriller. Through no fault of Connelly’s.I respect Connelly for not walking on eggshells and for telling it like it is. I admire the fact that he was not afraid to be graphic when necessary because turning a blind eye to this kind of inhumanity is, in my opinion, just as dangerous as those who perpetrate this type of inhumanity. While some things may very well be better left unsaid, continued physical and sexual abuse of children should never be one of those things that are swept under the rug or dismissed or simply ignored because it’s “too uncomfortable” a subject matter.
There are a lot lot of serial killer novels out there. Michael Connelly's "The Poet" rests a cut above much of the slasher genre. "Poet" tells the story of Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, in Denver. His twin brother Sean, a homicide detective for the Denver police has just committed suicide, despondent over his inability to solve a grisly murder. Connelly crafts his story with quiet force - in the hearse traveling to the funeral with Sean's widowed wife Riley, Jack thinks, "Aside from the hurt-animal sound of Riley crying, the inside of the limo was as quiet as the inside of Sean's casket." Or as Jack describes trying to escape his own sorrow later, on the slopes of Telluride, "The grief that this simple conclusion brought me would not ebb, even when I was gliding down the slopes, the wind cutting in behind my sunglasses and pulling tears from my eyes." Connelly shows some nice touches. Describing a detective, huge and massive looking while sitting, but when the detective stood Jack saw his short, stubby legs, "He had the lower half of another man's body."Jack doesn't beleive his brother killed himself and sets out to prove it. Before long, he's up to his chin in a nationwide plot to kill homicide detectives masking them as suicides, an Edgar Alan Poe-loving serial killer, and Jack wades in up to his ears in FBI help/interference. Connelly's story leaps forward for a time, one exciting turn after another, and then somewhere near the middle it bogs down, like a roller coaster ratcheting slowly up that final incline. And we reach the peak, poised before the final drop, looking down dissappointed because the final run doesn't look like much. But somehow Connelly cleverly hides a barrel roll or two and some gravity-defying 360's before he deposits us at the station satisfied."The Poet" is not great literature, but it's a good thriller, and Connelly builds worthy characters who keep us guessing.
What do You think about The Poet (2002)?
Oh, mid-‘90s, how quaint you seem in this book published in ‘96 with your dial-up internet connections, faxes, pagers, landline phones, and new-fangled digital cameras. Perhaps the thing dating this the most is the idea that The Rocky Mountain News editors’ biggest concern is that they’ll get scooped by another newspaper in the fast paced world of print journalism, and not that their entire industry will collapse and they’ll be out of business by 2009. Of course, if all their reporters acted like Jack McEvoy, it’s no wonder they went broke. Jack’s twin brother was a cop who apparently shot himself, but when Jack decides to exploit his tragic death by writing a story about police suicides, the research indicates that a serial killer has been stalking cops across the country and making it look like they killed themselves. Soon Jack has blackmailed his way onto an FBI task force chasing the killer by ruthlessly threatening to expose the hunt and maybe spooking the guy, but letting his brother’s murderer potentially go free is a small price to pay to get a really righteous scoop. He runs up a huge expense account bill by tagging along as the FBI tracks the killer across the country, and he never really does give the Denver paper the juicy exclusives they’re expecting. So it seems like the old Rocky Mountain News had some pretty sloppy business practices going on when it came to covering stories.You can probably tell that I wasn’t overly fond of Jack as a character. I found him self-absorbed and incredibly stupid at times. It’s too bad, because this was a better than average serial killer story with new take on the premise and lots of good twists and turns to keep it interesting. If I would have found Jack more sympathetic, I probably would have liked it more.
—Kemper
This review is for the abridged audio cassette version of the book. You don't need another description of the plot, because you can find it in multiple reviews already. This was a good read (listen). Abridging the novel to approx. 3 hours was a bit severe - there were quite a few jumps in "detection" that were probably explained more believably in the book.I can see how this has the potential to be pretty creepy in its full figure. The reader was not intrusive - I didn't find myself noting emphasis in unexpected places (which is unfortunately quite common in audio books), and the different "voices" to indicate different characters weren't ridiculous. I had no preconceived notion of how the main character should sound, so it was fine with me.I definitely recommend this book - though a longer version will probably be more satisfying.
—Tracy
Michael Connelly is an excellent writer. This book was well-paced, well-plotted, and completely engrossing for all of 352 pages. Unfortunately, the edition I read had 434 pages, and therein lies the problem. If you haven't read "The Poet," but you intend to do so, I do not want to dissuade you from that endeavor, because Connelly really is a very good writer with an inventive mind and an evocative style. On the other hand, you may want to skip the rest of this review, as it is about to contain some possible spoilers. Without revealing the spoilers, I would be unable to justify my three star rating.********************************************************************"The Poet" started out with a lot of promise (news reporter Jack McEvoy's twin brother - a police homicide detective - is found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after having obsessed for months over a particular homicide victim). But all is not as it seems, and McEvoy uncovers a series of serial killings of homicide detectives all across the country that have cleverly been made to look like suicides. Great hook. Really captivating. The creepy suspected killer is a pedophile and truly horrifying character, and Connelly does a fine job of making him disgusting and realistic at the same time. Once the FBI becomes involved and McEvoy has to blackmail them into letting him join the task force in order to keep the story under wraps, it all takes off brilliantly. For genre fiction, this had me reading past my bedtime on work nights and looking forward to the next time I could open its covers. Which is why I was so truly disappointed when right at the peak of the story, our supposedly intelligent and savvy reporter does something so absurd and unbelievable, I felt not only let down by the story, but questioning of Connelly's abilities to bring this thing home properly. And I was right to feel that way, because after that first lapse, the rest of the plot devolved into even greater absurdities that made the book feel false and insulting. Sure, throughout the book there were a few things that happened that felt somewhat inauthentic or seemed a bit too convenient, but at the time, I thought it was intentional staging for an ending that would incorporate all of these things and make them seem more necessary to the plot. I really felt that Connelly had put all of these elements into the storyline on purpose in order to lead us along until the big reveal, when their vital nature would be explained and his inclusion of them, vindicated. (Yes, I tend to expect too much at times. I'm aware of that.)The most glaring of these contrivances was the all-too-formulaic romance that ensued between Connelly's McEvoy and the "beautiful but troubled" FBI agent he is paired with on the case. I assumed her seduction of him would have searing implications later on and be part of a really clever game that had been played on McEvoy, the FBI, and/or the reader. I was assuming Connelly had a far more clever mousetrap set than he actually did. But some of the formulaic elements turned out to be just that, and some of the contrivances were merely to move the plot along from A to B to C. It wasn't so much a creative journey as a serviceable outline. There were a hundred different ways this book could have ended and still surprised the reader while maintaining its realism and integrity. Instead, Connelly decided to travel a route that made zero sense and left anyone who knows anything about actual crimes shaking his or her head at the ridiculousness of the contrivance. It seemed like such a smart book for such a long time, I guess I never thought Connelly would go for blatant sensationalism instead of a really clever outcome. With his background in news reporting, I thought he'd prefer a well told story to tabloid dreck. So, even though I enjoyed the writing and the pace, the ending was a real disappointment. That said, I may actually try him again someday. Just not someday soon.Oh, and just as an aside, I think of this as a modern story, but because it was written in the late nineties, there were some technological references that came off as archaic to a modern reader. I was pulled out of the story several times when it referenced scenarios that would not have happened in a modern setting merely because the characters lacked cell phones or easy computer access (detectives having to rely on "pay phones" and "pagers," people faxing things instead of sending them electronically, the plotline that hinged on "newfangled digital cameras," so common now. I kept thinking to myself that the story played like something from the 1970's instead of something recent. That's not Connelly's fault, of course, but for some reason, it was really a strange distraction.
—Deborah Edwards
