Review: Garden of Beasts
Garden of Beasts, Jeffrey Deaver. Thriller.
But of course, I forgot the first rule of successful writing, and therefore being successful in getting and keeping the attention of a reader. Tell a good yarn.
Deaver always does. And he's very much a man's writer, his main characters, and the best drawn ones, usually being fairly macho males. Though invariably men with hearts, and always with character flaws, typically ones which make them loners.
Paul Schumann, the protagonist here, is such a typical Deaver lead character. His 'flaw' is that he kills people for a living. But his saving grace, as he says himself, is that he only kills 'His mistakes'. The 'His' being God, whom we kind of get the impression Schumann believes in, and the 'mistakes' being other killers, but people who kill for the 'wrong' reasons. But our 'hero' always does his Godly business for money.
The storyline has Schumann sent to Germany in the weeks prior to the 1936 Olympic Games, apparently hired to assassinate a key architect of Hitler's rearmament of Germany prior to WW2. The carrot for Schumann is a full pardon for his past crimes, the balancing whip being the threat of trial and conviction and the ultimate sanction if he either fails or refuses the project.
Deaver sketches deftly on the Olympics canvas the various state-developed evils of pre-war Germany, and provides a leavening of humanity in the character of a policeman in Berlin who finds himself inadvertently on the track of Schumann.
It is a chilling tale in several different respects. Not least because our today is not a great deal different in too many parts of our world. The story may be set 70 years ago, but the details of the time still resonate far too regularly in our daily newspapers.
Did Paul Schumann find redemption? Well, he was always going to. Except not quite in the way that we might have expected.
And that's why I like Jeffrey Deaver's work. Because redemption is never a simple thing, and he knows it.
Brian Byrne.
