This was, I was hoping, my steal of the trip. We were heading home, lugging carry on and two small children through Shannon’s lovely concourse, and we stumbled upon Hughes & Hughes massive sale going on. When I say we stumbled upon it I mean that we’d gotten forewarning of it when my sister-in-law and family had reported the going out of business sale at the airport arm of the bookseller, so we didn’t quite stumble upon it so much as we targeted it like a book-seeking missile.
We loaded up a bag or two of books, and headed to security, happy with our haul. It was a mix of business books (not mine, quoth, err, me), kiddie books for the, umm, kids, a fiction of varying prospects. I like to go for local authors when we’re back, and David Rice was local by way of a trip or two round the world and into the priesthood, even. So he was my great hope. Even moreso than the insufferable John Banville writing as the (presumably) less sufferable Benjamin Black. I’ve bought two Benjamin Black novels by now, and I haven’t touched a one, for fear he turns out to be as painful to read as he was writing as himself.

So it was with great pleasure that I settled down with the Rice book once we were marginally adjusted to being back home in the States.
The story… well, here are the basics:
There is a massive nuclear reactor in England which has a dubious safety record, handles nuclear waste from all over the world, there is a woman journalist tasked with writing about it for her paper, there is a television priest doing a documentary on the last days of Pompeii and he has a feeling, a sneaking feeling that the manic behavior that gripped the people of Pompeii in their last days, which they refused to believe could be their last days (simply because it was inconceivable, which is, itself, the Pompeii Syndrome of the title), well, that manic behavior was exhibiting itself now, so what was the inconceivable disaster they could all face? There’s a Middle Eastern sheik with his castle, software plant, and theme park in Galway, staffed entirely by people from the Middle East and none at all from the west of Ireland. There’s also the country’s (Ireland) main anti-terrorist policeman, Black Jack, as he’s known, who is scared, during the course of the novel, by a woman out of her mind with Alzheimer’s disease who chases him with a frying pan.

It’s an… okay, I suppose, crack at a story. The idea was interesting-ish enough. Somewhere, though, David Rice read a book about writing in which the advice given went something like this:

“Show, don’t tell the dear Reader what is happening.”

Unfortunately, this advice was taken to mean that, so long as he doesn’t explicitly come out and write something like:

Jack is conflicted about his role as an anti-terror policeman, and is quite smart and open-minded, really, he just finds that people follow certain stereotypes sometimes, so he looks into it, without being racist, really.

Which is a good thing. Instead, however, he writes:

“Jack,” said his partner, “I know you’re conflicted about your role as an anti-terror policeman, and are quite smart and open-minded, really, and I know you just find people follow stereotypes sometimes, so you look into it, but you’re not racist, I know.”

Which is not great.
The whole thing gets unwieldy, fast. I quickly began to feel like I was being bludgeoned, which may have been a clever terrorist/torture ploy on Mr. Rice’s part. If so, good one.
By the last half of this book, unfortunately, I was reading just to get it over with. He had a few mildly entertaining twists, but I couldn’t get away from the dialogue telling me, rather than showing me anything. And the characters, whether it was the ham-handed descriptions/characterizations or something… else, just didn’t work, for me. The sheik was very one dimensional. The ranting racist West Ireland councilman was very one dimensional. The Black Jack character was… well, he was more than one dimensional, it’s just that none of the dimensions were contiguous. The reporter was… two dimensional, but again, the two dimensions were miles apart and at odds (hard to do, when you’re that far apart), and not in a good way.

At any rate, I finished the book off, and picked up another ‘find’ prospect Amazon dropped in my lap for less than a buck: Peter Spiegelman’s Black Maps, which has, so far, been a million times (roughly, and possibly adjusting for inflation) better, in terms of writing, a cohesive story, and well-paced action. Inconceivable that it could be as bad as The Pompeii Syndrome (which, again, I wouldn’t say was bad… just… difficult or tedious reading).