THE SIGNAL
Ron Carlson
Viking Adult
Fiction
ISBN: 9780670021000
There’s more intense action crammed into Ron Carlson’s brief new novel than in many works twice its length. Couple that with two complex and absorbing protagonists and gorgeous writing that pays homage to the natural world, and you have a deeply appealing work that’s easy to appreciate on a variety of levels.
For each of the last 10 years, Mack and Vonnie have rendezvoused on September 15th for a few days of camping and fishing at Clark Lake, in the Wind River Range of western Wyoming, where winter edges in even before the arrival of fall. After eight years of marriage, the two have divorced, but they’ve agreed to reenact this ritual a final time. Mack, the son of a rancher, has fallen on hard times. After his father's death, he has sold off two-thirds of the ranch’s acreage and has closed the dude ranch where he met Vonnie as a teenager when she came west in the summertime. Failing as a bookstore owner and computer consultant, Mack has descended into the grim and dangerous job of drug running while battling alcoholism. His impulsive decision to apply an iron pipe to the windshield of Vonnie’s boyfriend’s car lands him in jail for 20 days, and he is about as close to the bottom as he can get.
Mack and Vonnie’s idyll begins calmly enough, as they traverse mountain trails and fish for trout in shimmering lakes, the tensions of their fractured relationship simmering just under the surface. But when they stumble across some elk poachers with ties to Mack’s drug work, their trip takes on a decidedly darker and more violent turn. Vonnie injures her leg in the attempt to escape, and after traveling together for a time they decide to split up in the hope of eluding their pursuers.
To complicate matters, Mack’s fishing trip isn’t entirely for pleasure. A sinister figure named Yarnell, for whom Mack had previously forwarded coded computer messages, has hired him to spot what Yarnell describes as a crashed drone aircraft. Yarnell has provided a GPS-equipped BlackBerry to help Mack spot the downed craft. His reward is $10,000 if he brings back the drone’s mysterious cargo intact and $5,000 simply for locating the plane. But when Mack, in the midst of his escape, finally finds it, he makes a frightening discovery that thrusts him even deeper into danger.
Carlson doesn’t overplay the cat-and-mouse game as Mack and Vonnie flee on foot down the mountain with several ruthless and determined men on horseback and in helicopters on their heels. Yet there are enough hairsbreadth escapes and a powerful sense of uncertainty about the plot’s resolution to propel the story forward to its intense conclusion.
Inseparable from the novel’s tightly-constructed plot is Carlson’s deep engagement with the natural environment, the “wild rough top of the world” where the story unfolds. On almost every page, it seems, there’s a fresh, closely observed detail. From the “sound like a river rock walking down a stream bottom” to the sky he describes as a “gray pillowed gridlock,” or the chilly dawn that offers “no heat in the planks of sunlight,” Carlson’s grasp of metaphor is sure and impressive in the vivid images he consistently summons. That control isn’t limited to mere abstract description of the ravishing natural phenomena that form the story’s setting. He firmly grounds his characters in that starkly beautiful world. Describing how Mack experiences an approaching twilight, Carlson observes, “The angle of light grew fragile; it made him want to hurry. It had always called to him, and now it hurt. You always felt time as a tangible heartbeat in the mountains. The days were short.”
No doubt some readers will hear echoes of Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy in THE SIGNAL's clean, tightly-controlled prose and its story of the small scale of human travails when played out against the gorgeous but unforgiving natural world. Yet it would be a disservice to Ron Carlson to suggest that this accomplished work is in any way derivative of these masters. In truth, he has created something equally masterful of his own.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
