I remember encountering two conflicting ideas a few years ago. First, someone quoted an old professor who had said something like, "There are too many great books in the world, more than you can read in a lifetime, to waste your time reading merely good books." I armed myself with this philosophy as a mental justification for not accepting the kinds of books that people like to recommend to me: My mother-in-law is a fan of historical romances and is forever saying things like, "This book started out okay but got a little better and I thought that you might like to read it Krista"; or my brother suggests thrillers or sci-fi ("Don't you ever just read a book for its plot, Krista?"), but with my quest for the great books, I have been able to politely point out that I have my own book pile to get through and no thanks to yours. Then I read another quote that challenged my notion of the great book: "Anyone who states 'I don't read genre fiction' is masking intellectual insecurity." That floored me, and being a person of moderate intellectual insecurity, I had to wonder, "Is it true? Do I focus my reading on literature because I don't want to be seen reading pulp? Or is it not a public unmasking that I'm afraid of, but rather a revelation of the lie I'm telling myself; am I not as smart as I think I am?" This reminds me of the movie A Fish Called Wanda, wherein Kevin Kline's Otto character was constantly reading and attempting to quote from Nietzsche (a name he can't even pronounce) and Jamie Lee Curtis, as Wanda, called him stupid anyway:
Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?
Otto: [superior smile] Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it!
It should have been easy to just dismiss this "intellectual insecurity" business, but since it resonated with me, I needed to reconcile the notions of "great books" and "genre fiction" and concede that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, even if I have zero interest in Romances and Westerns and Sci-Fi and Crime…
And then Lisa Moore, quickly climbing to the top of my list of favourite authors, releases Caught; a book that, right from the garish, pulpy cover, announces itself, unabashedly, as genre fiction: Crime; Adventure; Detection. With her mastery of mood and place and character, Moore elevates the cliché to the sublime, to the literary, and proves that a great book can be found within any framework.
We meet Slaney on the run, having just escaped from prison, and with Moore's customary layering of past and present, we quickly learn what crime he was convicted of (drug smuggling) and where he is heading (more drug smuggling). It's a wonder why someone would break out of prison just to commit another crime, but we soon realise that Slaney's youthful optimism, his hubris in the face of obvious obstacles, is his strength and his undoing.
This time they would do it right. He could feel luck like an animal presence, feral and watchful. He would have to coax it into the open. Grab it by the throat.
(H)e knew how to look at people so they could be who they were, which basically meant he had a capacity for trust. He thought of trust…as a vestigial organ, near his liver, swollen, threatening to burst. Maybe it would poison him. But it was also his special skill. His strength.
The fact that Slaney trusts the people around him (despite discovering Hearn's many lies, despite his reservations about Carter and Ada, despite getting a bad feeling about Brophy) makes his eventual capture a foregone conclusion (also reinforced by the title Caught in bold red font on the cover). But as Patterson muses about the foregone conclusion of a bullfight:
It was the certainty that satisfied some desire in the audience. The best stories, he thought, we've known the end from the beginning.
Which begs the question: If we know how this story will end, what's the point of reading it? To which I would answer: It's about the journey. Within the framework of the Crime genre, Moore writes with her astonishing craftsmanship. The irony of the authorities knowing Slaney's every move, from having allowed the prison break to using ghost cars to pick him up while hitchhiking to move him along to his next criminal venture, was jarring and delicious; I found myself sympathising with and rooting for each side in this cat and mouse game; both Slaney and Patterson deserved to come out on top.
There is a chapter in Caught (Truth and Knowledge, pp 131-136) that perfectly illustrates what I think of as Lisa Moore's unique style. It relates two stories about Slaney as a twelve year old, two events that happened on the same afternoon: a baseball game that reveals his character and formative relationships with Hearn and Jennifer; and finding his parents with an encyclopedia salesman at home, which captures their hopes and expectations for him (and adds further irony since the reader knows Slaney becomes a convict). Although there is a definite sequence of events, ballgame then meeting the salesman, the stories are interspersed, a page about one, a couple paragraphs about the other, weaving back and forth, until the revelations seem larger than the sum of the two events. It's this type of alchemy in Moore's writing that make the journey more than worthwhile-- I could reread this chapter over and over again and not see how she accomplishes the magic of it.
Lisa Moore seems to address my own misgivings about genre fiction through the indiscriminate tastes of the youthful Ada:
Ada was reading murder mysteries and Hemingway and she had a Fitzgerald and a really good Dashiell Hammett, she said, and when she was done she tossed them over the side…She'd read three Agatha Christies in two days…Ada closed the book and sat up straight, looking hard at the horizon as if she'd just figured something out.
The big reveal, she said. That's my favourite part.
Why are you reading those stupid things? Carter asked.
The question I find intriguing is: Was Carter referring to just the Agatha Christies or to Ada's entire book pile as "those stupid things"? Is Lisa Moore purposefully conflating the classics with the genre fiction? With literary allusions throughout the book (Slaney could be thought of as a modern day Odysseus -- on his odyssey there are sirens, sea monsters [giant squid], a Cyclops [spy satellite] and a hurricane [sent from Poseidon because of his hubris ?]) and Hearn becoming a professor of literature, the author is acknowledging the literary while seeming to write an adventure tale. As in all great fiction, there is more to this book than meets the eye.
Although I did enjoy this journey very much, I didn't feel a perfect connection with the characters and plotline, and so I can't give Caught a perfect grade. I am delighted, however, to have been educated on how genre fiction can indeed contain great books.
