Vox Publica

Cast of Shadows

Salon is one of my favorite sources for information and I particularly like them for their seasonal book recommendations. They've guided me to some very unusual and interesting books such as The Hamilton Case and The Ghost Writer. But they failed me completely in recommending Cast of Shadows. Its author, Kevin Guilfoile, is a Salon contributor so I am somewhat suspicious that the good review is due to editorial bias. Still, the book has gotten good reviews at Amazon and apparently (at least according to its website) has been well received by book critics. Let me then be the lone voice of decent who calls it like it is: "Cast of Shadows" is a lousy techno-thriller and Guilfoile a wannabe poor man's Michael Crichton.

The novel concerns a doctor who specializes in cloning human beings. After his daughter is killed by an unknown assailant, he decides to clone the DNA left on the scene so that, one day, he'll be able to know what his daughter's killer looks like. The premise isn't bad, but the plot - including its few twists and turns - is whole predictable. There are absolutely no surprises, everything is telegraphed chapters ahead so that there is no "thrill" left in accopanying the characters through their journey. Moreover, the characters themselves are shallowly drawned, they are basically stock characters with no inner lives or complexities, adding that to the fact that we know what will happen to them makes it very hard to care for their fates.

The language in the book doesn't flow well and reading it sometimes becomes cumbersome. The dialogue seemed forced and it was often tedious to read. This is Mr. Guilfoile's first novel, so I wonder if the techniques of non-fiction writing just don't translate well into the fictional realm.

Worst of all, the book missed a great opportunity to at least present the issues on the human cloning debate. It showed religious fanatics opposing it and killing doctors who cloned people (a la abortion providers), and a scientific community that universaly approved of it, but it didn't make a case (much less a good case) for either side. Most importantly, it never even asked, much less answered the question of why cloning was a better alternative than artificial insemination.

In all, I found this book boring and formulaic and I cannot recommend it.

Posted by marga at June 17, 2005 11:52 PM | TrackBack