Diablerie
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Mosley's latest novel is a New York-based murder-mystery that tells the story of a middle-aged senior computer programmer (as the author himself once was) who is profoundly alienated despite the outward appearance of a contented family life; a man with a troubled past and a possible history of alcohol-related violence. When a Russian woman from his past turns up unexpectedly, former sins come back to haunt him.
As a fan of the noir genre and of the writer himself I have to profess to a twinge of disappointment with this one. Whereas Easy Rawlins took me onto and under the streets of L.A., central character Ben Dibbuk doesn't manage to capture that same kind of atmosphere in New York. One of the reasons is the relative lack of anger at the prejudices that exist against African Americans, a central emotion throughout the Easy Rawlins series; it's conspicuous for its absence. There is also a degree of confusion as to how and why a bland, salary-man character such as Dibbuk would be married to a woman who runs a glamourous magazine, and how a man on such a modest salary would have the resources to pay for the considerable upkeep of a prostitute. More problematic is the question of whether the crime that Dibbuk thinks he might be accused of (in his past) has even a remote chance of ever going to trial. Ultimately it's a tale of morality, of a man which a damaged early background who seeks to mask those scars of parental abuse with a veneer of indifference. Throughout the tale there is an ever-growing sense of dread, a feeling that something terrible is about to happen, and while this sensation kept me turning the pages, when the last one was turned and the book itself closed, I felt another sense: one of anti-climax, and an inclination to ruffle back through the book to see if I had missed something. A page-turner, then, but the individual components fail to create a satisfactory whole.
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To Feel or Not to Feel
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Diablerie occurs when a vampire drinks the blood and absorbs the soul of another vampire. In Diablerie, the surface meaning of the word is tied to a new trendy magazine that Ben Dibbuk's wife edits in Manhattan. But the imagery of the book is clearly tied back to the vampire concept.
Realize that this is not Easy Rawlins back in Watts trying to right a few wrongs. This is Ben Dibbuk, a fiftyish programmer who can keep out-of-date code working so Our Bank can process its accounts without installing a new system. He earns a good salary and no one bothers him. But life is definitely boring.
He has a lovely wife and a young adult daughter, but he doesn't feel much, except when he's engaged in bed with his young Russian girl friend. He didn't intend to have a girl friend: He just wanted to help out a woman and one thing led to another.
All that changes when his wife insists that he accompany her to an event for the magazine where he meets a woman who claims to know him very well. But Ben used to drink and doesn't remember anything from those years. After he reformed, his period of not feeling much began.
From there, Ben begins to tear apart the blind spots in his life . . . both before and now. Can he survive such an exposition? Or has his soul been permanently stolen when he was bled?
The strength of the book is seeing Ben gradually come back into control of his life and memory. The weakness of the book is that it's too much like just reading about a mid-life crisis that an aging man is experiencing and where sex with a young woman is the answer. I think the story would have worked better if Ben were much younger.
Like Killing Johnny Fry, Diablerie gains most of its strength from the extensive and extreme sex scenes. To me, those scenes felt more than a little gratuitous. But I can't argue with Mr. Mosley if he wants to develop a new audience that needs those thrills to enjoy his writing.
Ultimately, the plot seemed contrived to me. It just didn't ring true. I was left with unanswered questions that made the plot seem unbelievable on page after page. It's almost like this book was written by a new author rather than the highly skilled Mr. Mosley.
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daring, adventurous, powerful
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Compact, concise, compelling. Dark. Walter Mosley has crafted a brief novel, an exploration of the human psyche that grips the reader with the opening page.
We know the protagonist's name. It is Ben Dibbuk, he's an almost 50-year-old computer programmer, married with a daughter in college. He has Svetlana, a Russian mistress his daughter's age. Nonetheless, exactly who is Ben Dibbuk? He's alienated, unable to care for anyone or anything. Nothing matters to him - not his wife, Mona, his daughter, Seela, or his work. He simply would like to be left alone.
Earlier he had suffered from frightening nightmares and went into therapy at the behest of Mona. The terrifying dreams stopped after awhile as did his visits to the therapist. One day Mona insists that he go to a banquet with her, an evening with her co-workers at a fashion magazine, Diablerie. It is there that he's approached by the keynote speaker, Star, a woman who claims to know him. He has no recollection whatsoever of her. When she tells him the exact date they were together, he replies, "That's back when I was still drinking......I was just telling the waitress there that I've forgotten more nights than I remember."
That same evening he is introduced to Harvard Rollins, a fact-checker for the magazine, and as he later learns his wife's lover, the man she has asked to look into Ben's past. Why?
At this point for whatever reason he feels compelled to get in touch with his mother, a woman he hasn't seen in 15 years. Just before Ben hung up he heard his mother say, "...I never thought I'd feel that I regretted my own son's birth but-"
He also places a telephone call to his brother, Briggs, who is now in jail. Briggs remembers another phone call from Ben some 20 years earlier in which Ben asked questions about criminal apprehension, mentioned something wrong that he had done, and that there had been a witness - a woman by the name of Star.
Moseley is a master of prose. Who else would describe an alcoholic's desire for cognac as "...rich amber liquor moving through my veins like chamber music on a sunny afternoon in a many-windowed room in July"?
He's also a master at creating an intriguing mystery, one that is irresistible to readers and grows deeper as the narrative moves on. Daring, adventurous, powerful, Moseley is all of these as he proves once again in the hauntingly erotic Diablerie.
- Gail Cooke
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