Bookreporter.com - AMBERVILLE by Tim Davys

AMBERVILLE
Tim Davys
Harper
Fiction
ISBN: 9780061625121

Eric Bear felt he had put his past behind him. He had settled into a peaceful life shared with his beautiful wife, Emma Rabbit, and a successful advertising career at Wolle & Wolle. But a hard knock on the door ends all that: Nicholas Dove is there, demanding the impossible. Dove, an infamous gangster, has learned he is on the fabled Death List and wants Eric to remove his name --- or else he will kill Emma.

If the animal names in Tim Davys’s novel strike you as odd, the rest of the details of this story, by a Swedish author published under a pseudonym, will be astonishing. The action takes place in Mollisan Town, an alternate world of painted streets inhabited by stuffed animals. Eric himself is a former juvenile criminal, the son of prominent Amberville parents, who has come up in the world. The visit from Dove sends him looking for his old cronies --- Tom-Tom Crow, Snake Marek and Sam Gazelle --- in the hopes they can help him find the Death List. The list is both the stuff of legends and the stuff of nightmares. None of the Mollisan Town stuffed animals know for sure it exists, but all have seen friends, family and loved ones taken away by the mysterious Chauffeurs because supposedly their names were on it. Eric has to race against time to solve the oldest and most profound mystery of his civilization, and along the way he uncovers many ugly truths about the society he lives in and the people he thought he knew well.

The underworld into which Eric and the others plunge is both familiar to them and unsettling. It is populated with angry animals out for revenge, like Hyena Bataille and the secretive and powerful Rat Ruth. They are contrasted by the moralistic and paternal archdeacon Odenkirk and Eric's saintly twin brother Teddy. Yet nothing is really as it seems in Mollisan Town. Eric finds himself trying to navigate in a world without clear rules, and his actions threaten to destroy its very structure.

Davys’s interesting debut novel explores love and identity as well as authority, loyalty and even life and death. The institutions of church and the government are mirrored by shady casinos and a village-size garbage dump, and Eric is mirrored by his brother. The narration moves between a third-person view of Eric and several first-person perspectives, including those of Teddy and a shadowy and controlling force who hopes to thwart Eric's attempts at finding the Death List.

AMBERVILLE is a unique and clever take on classic noir. It is dark and violent, seedy and complex, but also the characters are, as Davys constantly reminds readers, stuffed animals. He spends considerable time constructing and maintaining Mollisan Town, but the effect is not seamless. It is difficult to conceptualize, even though the story itself is good. There are a fair number of surprises, and the danger seems very real. Davys adds punch to the plot with Teddy's spiritual and philosophical musings on good and evil, presenting a nice counterbalance to the action in the rest of the book. Still, the novel is just never as tight as it could or should be.

Genre fiction is built on conventions, but good genre fiction finds ways to honor these conventions while adding something new. In the end, AMBERVILLE does manage to become good genre fiction. Despite its flaws, this strange and fun book is worth reading.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

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