The Gun Seller (Saturday Book Club)
More often than not, “celebrity books” are derided by critics but manage to sell rather well. A Night Without Armor by Jewel is filled with mediocre poetry, yet it’s one of the best selling poetry books of all time because she released it at the height of her fame. The Gun Seller was published in 1996, yet it’s only in wide release in the United States now because of the author's, Hugh Laurie’s, starring role in the medical drama House, M.D. The casual reader might pick up the novel thinking the main character would be a secret agent version of House.
They’d be mostly right.
From a writer’s standpoint Thomas Lang is a likable enough character. The first person point of view allows the reader to really get inside the head of a snarky asshole who can crack wise while he’s smashing heads and saving the world from nuclear annihilation. The only problem I found with him was that Thomas Lang was always on, there were no moments of seriousness, just endless lead-ins to the next joke with a healthy edge of sarcasm cynicism, or wordplay. Even Austin Powers had a couple moments of pathos when trying to stop Dr. Evil.
I suppose this brings me to my main complaint about the book: I don’t know what kind of book it’s trying to be. It certainly has all the elements of spoof: the main character never takes anything seriously, so why should the reader take anything in the plot all that seriously? But it can’t be a spoof because the book attempts to be serious as well. You can’t joke your way through a discussion on the dangers of the military-industrial complex and the ever present threat of terrorist attacks and manufactured wars. So it could be an attempt at a straight James Bond kind of adventure, but the main character prevents the adventure from being taken seriously. It’s a vicious circle. A good example is a scene where Lang is captured, and brutally murders his captor while cracking jokes in his head the whole time, fuzzing up the line between funny and disturbing. It’s as if Hugh Laurie wanted to make a point and be taken seriously but couldn’t find his way out of the farce corral. It reminds me of the saying of how when all you have is a hammer, you tend to see every situation as a nail.
It was this conflict of theme and tone that reminded me of the difficulties I had while writing Lightning Rod. Just like Laurie allowed his tone to overtake the story, I was worried that the theme of abuse survival would overtake the book when what I wanted was to create a work of urban fantasy (which I stumbled in at first by making the primary antagonist two-dimension) when I wanted to make sure that James’s tone would give the idea of someone overwhelmed but endeavoring to continue on.
Also, I used the same first person style that Laurie did, having a running commentary on the events occurring in the plot with the occasional joke or quip. With James, though I wanted the humorous breaks to serve more as a character quirk, with him using humor as a means of defense against the sudden flood of stressors in his life. With Thomas Lang, I was always wondering if the character really didn’t take anything all that seriously or if the author was just using the story to tell as many jokes as possible.
That The Gun Seller is a “celebrity book” could give it a bit of a pass as far as quality is concerned, as celebrity-written novels often have a low bar set for them, but perhaps if we expected more from them, we’d find out that they have more creative ability than just acting or singing or what-have-you. If anything, at least it would mean we all wouldn't have to suffer through any more of Jewel’s poetry. ;)
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://vaughndemont.com/2018/07/21/the-gun-seller-saturday-book-club/