Wednesday, November 20, 2002
Title: Wisdom Of Crocodiles
Author: Paul Hoffman
Publisher: Black Swan
If there is one downside to The Wisdom Of Crocodiles it is perhaps that there is too much going on - too many characters, who could easily be spun out into their own complete novels. Testament to this is that there has already been a film made following one of the threads of the novel, with another film based on another thread and a TV series on yet another thread reported to be in the works. But in turn it is the amount of ideas that are here that make it as much fun to read, especially as Hoffman ties every strand together.
A woman meets the love of her life, only for him to rip her throat out with his teeth. Her godfather has just retired from the anti-terrorist unit and taken a new job as the head of a similar group that tackles financial fraud. Using his old contacts he has someone look for his missing goddaughter, a policeman who has just separated from his wife. A wife who found his pornography collection and is trying to understand his motivation, while also dealing with her job as an accountant. And so on, with the inclusion of the leaning tower of Pisa, terrorist attacks, the hardest cross wordclue in the world, parachuting, machine intelligence and alien contact.
With all that it is hardly surprising that the book is of a decent length and that it took Hoffman 13 years to pull it all together into this final form. Setting everything up as he goes along, spinning each character out so that they take on a unique life of their own, while at the same time managing to tie those lives back into the body by linking them back in to a thread other than the one which they originally spun out from. While at the same time also having to work each of these threads to a point where they each have enough of a sense of closure that he can let them lie - bringing it back down to the original characters and the climax of their stories.
RVWR: PTR
November 2002
