The Immortal Part

Rating:
Summary: Danger High Voltage Fiction
Review: An aromatic crispy duck of a debut novel from this promising new talent. A young British lawyer wades into moral quicksand when advising Eastern European mafia on the finer aspects of international tax law. A simple mistake and the rolling stone is gathering more moss than you would find in the most unkempt of English Country gardens.

'Serves you right for being a self-serving amoral greed-bucket', one is tempted to think...but doesn't everyone deserve just a little redemption? Fortunately, fate steps in to deal a lesson in the futility of struggle against the better self.

Amidst the money, power and beautiful Ukrainian ladies, Wakling has delivered a novel of sharp psychological and moral insight that makes you want to quit your job in the city and take up writing.

A great book and an even better read.

Rating:
Summary: The Immortal Part
Review: Excellent read - beautifully written and a thrilling plot. The new Ernest Hemmingway.

Rating:
Summary: masterful work of psychological suspense
Review: He is a junior lawyer at Madison & Vane, a very prominent English firm, helping one of the senior attorneys working on a brief that would advise UKI on the refinancing of two of its subsidiaries through U.S. investors. Lewis Penn is a very methodical, by the book lawyer who is successful because he doesn't make mistakes. At the meeting, he makes a very good impression but he makes what will ultimately prove to be a fatal error when he walks out without taking the file.

Instead of admitting his blunder, he sneaks back into the meeting room and takes the file and makes a copy to be sent to his counterpart in the United States. When he gets a chance to look at the file, he realizes it is the wrong one. It contains criminal information that the client would never give away and when they learn of the error they make it plain to Lewis that he must return the file or suffer the very real consequences.

THE IMMORTAL PART is the story of a decent man who makes the wrong decision to keep from getting into trouble with his company. One small error in judgment plunges him into a whirlpool leading to additional poor indiscretions and the comission of some criminal acts. The protagonist learns too late that every action has its consequences that often can't be fixed or changed. Christopher Wakling has written a masterful work of psychological suspense.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: out of the blocks
Review: I have to be honest here and declare that I would normally avoid anything that might be, even remotely, touched with the 'corporate' or 'legal' thriller tag. I just think eek! Grisham and go into shutdown mode. Not my thang, not my thang at all. Still, I came to 'The Immortal Part' by a slightly odd route and after a little investigation became intrigued, and so it found itself at the top of my list. And a jolly good thing too.

Intentions are trumpeted from the first lines, the now well-quoted "Thirteen days ago I made a mistake. A momentary slip, but enough to launch me into freefall, a life unravelling in my wake."

Indeed, we're given a sketch of our narrator before we even turn that first page: Lewis Penn, mid-twenties, successful business lawyer with ginormous London law firm Madison & Vere, a penchant for detail; a deal striker, a note-taker, a pen pusher, a man taking the middle ground to get to the higher plains the conventional way. Half a dozen pages later and the 'momentary slip' happens. Entrusted with a file of confidential papers, Lewis loses them and tries to cover his tracks rather than admit his error.

And essentially that's all you need to know, because the details of circumstance are ultimately of little importance. All you really need to be aware of is that Lewis has mucked up, and royally. Every step he takes bounces him further and further into touch, but our interest - and this is where Wakling diverts smartly away from the roller coaster ride of your ten-a-penny-dreadful first novel tyros - relies less and less on events and much more critically on the moral and psychological rewiring his fallible protagonist is forced to undertake. It also helps that what we have here is good writing, neat turns of phrase and something with substantial literary merit behind it. Wakling a) knows what he's talking about and b) enjoys describing it.

Anyway ... increasingly, steadily, Lewis's paranoia begins to take hold. He can only confide in one person, his dying brother, Dan, but as Lewis's life begins to fall apart, it appears that Dan's is also coloured by deception. The graceless, faltering arc takes Lewis from London to Washington DC and back to London, but every move he makes, every decision he reaches is the wrong one, and when his home is turned upside down, he becomes convinced he is being pursued.

Lewis, a man keen on detail, is following a career path that makes (...) retention a godly virtue. One tiny step outside the circle and the architecture creaks. One further step, and another, and it crumbles. In a way it reminded me of the best of Cronenberg, a man also keen to prove that beneath a tiny veneer of skin there's a world of horror waiting for us. As a study of human foibles, with an all too imperfect hero at its core, a clever take on identity and something significantly removed from what you might expect, 'The Immortal Part' is a considerable achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Too Much Fat
Review: There's a blurb on the hardcover jacket that says "...The Immortal Part is that rare thing--a genuine literary thriller." Yes, you could say this has literary qualities. It definitely aspires to be more than a straight suspense novel. Unfortunately, in doing so, it loses the qualities that make for an exciting, page-turning read. Oh, I was turning pages all right--mostly to skip over extraneous descriptions, flashbacks, unnecessary character studies, and, worst of all, dream sequences. If there's anything more annoying than listening to a real person tell you their dreams (well, unless it's about you), it's reading a fictitious character's dreams. Okay, once maybe, briefly. But repeatedly and at length? I skipped over every one of those and didn't miss anything in the plot.

I do like the premise: The private and professional worlds of an ambitious, though rather ordinary, young lawyer intersect and ultimately collide in a strange and unexpected way. It's about character flaws, the law of unintended consequence, and the eerie power of coincidence.

Wakling begins the story promisingly enough. The hero's minor missteps that lead into an ever deepening quagmire are human and believable. We can all identify with making a mistake and then foolishly trying to fix it, rather than simply coming clean. As the old saw goes, "what a tangled web, etc."

However, this is not a unique concept on it's own. So what Wakling does is create a second web that by sheer chance becomes entangled with the first. There's a symbolism here along the lines of Greek tragedy, but I don't know that drama is served. The more he cuts back and forth between the two worlds, the more the story loses its momentum. Wakling wants to immerse us in the psychology of his characters, so we end up with a lot of scenes that do little to move the plot forward--scenes from the protagonist's childhood, scenes with his parents, scenes from his unconscious. At the same time, he leaves out information that would hint at the eventual outcome. In fact, the ending is a bit disappointing, given the possibilities.

Christopher Wakling has considerable talent, and this is an admirable debut, but next time, buddy, try to keep it leaner and meaner. Less portraiture, more story.