Sunday, June 16, 2002
Title:Body Mortgage
Author: Richard Engling
Publisher:
I picked up Body Mortgage second hand, a book published in 1989 and set in the future of 1999 and I guess in many ways it shows. Certainly there are problems with setting a novel in the near future, especially when it gets to the point when as far as the reader is concerned it is the past. From the predictions of millennial riots, TV phones rejected and the use of electric cars to the omission of mobile phones and the internet. Along with the technological issues of setting a book in the future that has become the past too soon are the cultural aspects - an under current of racism seeming to come through - whether that is a sign of the time (ie 1989), a deliberate affectation to get a more urban/gritty feel or something else all together isn't entirely clear - though it is something which I am particularly conscious of as I read the book.
In some ways Body Mortgage is a really bad book, pandering to clichés and barely surviving its own awkwardness. My reasons for picking it up are mixed, as I've mentioned it was second hand, therefore it was cheap, but also it sounded like it could be a curious mixture of odd ideas and cheese - which I admit I sometimes find amusing. The idea of the body mortgage comes from the market for body parts - there is always a demand for transplants, so someone came up with the idea of lending money based on the reclamation of the body. You get a loan of money from the bank and pay it back fine, but if you don't you then forfeit your body to the bank and you are chopped up for spares. An extreme idea to be sure, but as the main character points out only a fool would get involved in that. Gregory Blake is a private detective and against his better judgement finds himself taking on the job of protecting one of these fools - an inventor with a "wonderful new machine" which he has R&D'd with a body mortgage which is now due. Of course for this sort of book to work there needs to be more than one thing going on at once, so we have a mysterious someone having broken into the detectives office, someone telling folk that it was the detective who informed on a local agitator as being responsible for a bombing, and the contamination of a chemical supply at a regular client's works. Soon Blake is swamped by all the strands, but gradually starts to pull them all together.
In so many ways Body Mortgage conforms to all the rules of a private detective novel while seemingly oddly dated for something which should feel more contemporary. Engling apparently has an MA in creative writing, which sets me to thinking about training versus talent went it comes to something creative. There are ways to adhere to rules while bringing your work past those and ways to barely pull it off. Here Engling comes out with some things which just seem too much - the blossoming relationship between Blake and his secretary Mona seems too forced, too much of a narrative gambit in an attempt to play to the genre rules. In general the writing is something I am particularly conscious of, which is unusual and I don't think a good thing. Repeated phrases like "he recognised the guy instantly" being one aspect of the unnaturalness that comes through.
While the suggestion that Body Mortgage is "Chandler meets Blade Runner in a terrifying thriller set in a nightmare future" is unfortunate, on the whole it is an easy, undemanding read, which while not really good is okay enough.
RVWR: PTR
June 2002
