Emeralds and Espionage By Lynn Gardner Covenant Communications, 1995. Paperback: 252 pages. ISBN: 1-55503-771-2 Suggested retail price: $10.95 (US) Audience: Bodice buster fans who don't want the bodice bust, but do crave chaste chills and threatening thrills
Pearls and Perils By Lynn Gardner Covenant Communications, 1996. Paperback: 231 pages. ISBN: 1-55503-932-4 Suggested retail price: $10.95 (US) Audience: Bodice buster fans, etc.
Reviewed by: Harlow S. Clark

Bad Guys, Bullets, Bombs and Baubles

Part 1: The Pearls of Pauline

"Was this what my life was going to be like married to a special agent? Nothing but bad guys, bugs and bodies? It sounded like the name of a book." --End of chapter 7, Pearls and Peril.

"Nonetheless, I have thought a lot about what my friend, Dave Cowles, said after surviving a shoulda-been-fatal bacterial infection. He couldn't watch many movies anymore, he said, because life had become so precious to him, and it was taken so lightly by filmakers in love with special effects." --Margaret Young, AML-List, 30-JUN-1998, Re: Your favorite R movies?

I'm supposed to be reviewing Sapphires and Smugglers, but the cover says, "The Thrilling Romantic Sequel to Turquoise and Terrorists, which is "An Intense Romantic Thriller -- The Gripping Sequel to Diamonds and Danger, which was checked out of the library so I can't quote the blurb, but is a sequel to Pearls and Peril (checked out, but the cassette was in), "The Action-Packed Romantic Sequel to Emeralds and Espionage," which was also checked out, but they did have in the cassette abridgement, and by the time I got around to listening to it the paperback was checked in and I could compare the two.

I don't generally like abridgements (Mormon's and Moroni's notwithstanding), but this novel benefits from a good cutting. The second sentence reads "How long, how far I'd run I didn't know." The tape omits "how long." The fourth sentence: "A good run cleared my head, put my problems in perspective, and enabled me to think and plan more clearly." Tape omits the last third of that sentence. The tape omits various redundancies and repetitions throughout, indeed might combine this sentence and the one before to read, "Tape omits last third of that sentence and various redundancies and repetitions throughout."

I mention the repetition and redundancy, the things that benefit the novel when trimmed away, not to suggest Gardner is an inept writer, but because they relate to her delightful choice to make the heroine/narrator's mother a professor of literature and folklore. Not that Gardner does a lot with that fact. You don't get much sense from Emeralds and Espionage how a professor thinks, in the way that you do get a sense from, say, Thomas Harris's Red Dragon how a man who investigates serial murders thinks, gathers and processes clues. Rather Allison's mother professes language because Lynn Gardner loves language, particularly figures of speech.

As her alliterated titles suggest, Gardner uses figures of speech liberally, such as the parallelism in "How long, how far I'd run," or the polyptoton[1] in Pearls and Peril "my mind generating enough questions to generate a headache." Of course, she favors alliteration: "Icy daggers of dread danced up down my spine"(130, P&P). "I paused to run my fingers over the five-foot-tall gold peacock that fanned its filligreed feathers in front of the fireplace. (Page 6, E&E. The tape says, "fanned filligreed feathers.") "The dirty duo disappeared over the cliff toward the beach." (17, E&E. Tape says, "I watched the dirty duo disappear down the trail.") She sometimes combines alliteration with assonance and rhyme, such as this thought in E&E (Gardner italicizes Allison's thoughts), "I feel like I'm being carried downstream faster and faster toward a waterfall", which the tape reads as "faster and faster towards disaster."

So much play with sounds could get intrusive, though it generally rings natural, such as this sentence from Pearls and Peril: "If we tie our towels together I can take one end across, tie it to the other side and make a lifeline we can cross with" (note the polyptoton).

Gardner does not handle plot and characterization as well as she handles figures of speech. One can't expect adventure stories to show the everyday world, life as we actually live it. Adventure stories are tall tales, so it might seem silly to complain that neither plot nor characterizations are realistic. However, thrillers unavoidably raise ethical and political questions. Len Deighton's Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match (the first of his trilogy of trilogies, the other two being Spy Hook, Spy Line, and Spy Sinker, and Faith, Hope, and Charity, together with a prequel, Winter, none of which I've read) explores how spying affects families, how a spy under deep cover betrays both spouse and children. A good twelve years later I can still see Bernard Samson freezing the video on the image of now-inaccessible Fiona, staring at his wife in longing.

Perhaps the memory of Deighton's novels spoils for me the way Gardner handles a similar theme. Early on we learn that Allison's father was killed in Vietnam when she was a child but she's never believed that because she has certain telepathic powers and has never felt her father's spirit absent as it would be if he were dead. Interesting premise. Is it believable though, that a child would have no emotional scars knowing daddy was alive but couldn't or wouldn't be there?

Let me restate this. Thrillers, especially spy thrillers, are about deception. The genre's best deal with the ethics of deception, especially when the plot turns on parents deceiving their children or spouses deceiving each other. Early on Allison is kidnapped by Bart, an old lover who abandoned her without explanation. He draws her into a complex scheme involving a fake wedding. "I can't kneel before Bishop O'Hare and God and take vows and make covenants that are false" (108), she tells Bart. He reassures her that he loves her and the wedding can be real if she wants it to be. Allison doesn't understand what he's saying, doesn't believe him, takes a lot of convincing.

She doesn't have any such emotional baggage about her father, though, doesn't show any of the complex emotions a child would surely have who has grown up with one parent dead in effect if not in person. The situation is more complex than I'm suggesting, but I don't want to spoil the story, even though the lack of psychological depth makes the story unbelievable.

The story is unbelievable in other ways as well. The inablity to get into the US for medical treatment motivates much of the action in Pearls and Peril. I kept wondering why a man so wealthy and powerful couldn't just import a specialist. (Even if he needed a complex machine he could pay for it, and for smuggling it.) Of course, if I want psychological depth I can write my own thriller, and if all you want is graceful phrasing and non-stop action like the Perils of Pauline or Indiana Jones you'll probably like these novels.

Indeed, there's a lot to like. I've already mentioned the language. Let me quote a few more phrases: Ch17, P&P, "The blur of graceful gray forms gamboled, gliding through the air" a description of dolphins. This follows a meditation in ch 16 on prayer and the plan of salvation. Dolphins are answer to a prayer for help against a shark. I like including prayer in a spy thriller. That's one of the things that attracts me to the Mormon thrillers -- they take seriously people's spirituality, like Margaret Young's Salvador (I guess you could call a novel in which a man tries to murder his wife through a priesthood blessing an honorary thriller, at least), Robert Kirby's Brigham's Bees and Donlu Thayer's In the Mind's Eye (which obey the conventions of the hard-boiled police novel and the genteel Miss Marple genre and use prayer and faith to solve the mystery), and Jack Weyland's On the Run (which poses the question, 'What if the Cary Grant character in North by Northwest were a Mormon missionary returning home on the last day of his mission?').

But while I like the spirituality of these novels, the Perils of Pauline pacing presents a problem. Bart tells Allison that he dropped out of sight suddenly because he was tortured in a Tibetan prison (he has scars criss-crossing his back) and while in prison he was impressed by the faith another prisoner showed, a faith grounded in a blue book. He tells Allison that he has found the answers to all their old questions about where we came from, why we're here and where we go after this life. But both these novels move too fast for them to have time to sit down and discuss it. Jack Weyland recognized the need for quiet and silence in On The Run, and created a place where his characters could stop running and contemplate. Of course, at that point it stops being a thriller (the villain is defeated about halfway through -- though danger re-emerges briefly later) and becomes a meditation on two themes Weyland has been looking at, racism and cultural identity. Gardner doesn't want to slow her pacing down. Understandable: The pacing gives the novels a desparate quality: we can experience what constant pursuit with no chance to rest is like. But the pacing also makes the Mormon elements seem like a gimmick. Gardner was not able to find a way to say, 'Gentle Reader, I have just introduced the most important plot element.' Generally writers do such things by emphasizing something. Pausing. Slowing down (going too fast -- got to make the moment last). Adventure and chase, flight and escapade. That's the emphasis in these novels. I hope that in the later novels Gardner will find a way to slow things down enough to explore the spiritual lives of her characters, and particularly how spying affects spirituality and vice versa.

Nice tag line. I could end the review here. But I'm also reviewing recordings, and Michelle Zimmerman has not researched Hawaii as well as Lynn Gardner has, does not know how to pronounce Hawaiian names. She mentions travelling to Laie, which I'm sure is not pronounced like the potato chip company, anymore than Hilo is pronounced highlow' (my nickname in 7th grade at Keitokeskus Normaalilyseo, Oulu, Finland -- though it soon became hickalovi as the kids pronounced the g, h, and w (which their English textbook said was pronounced daubliu)). In describing an attempt to throw Bart into a volcano Zimmerman says, "when he starts moving around on that ash he'll slide right into Pele's arms," pronouncing Pele peel. A few paragraphs later, she says "right into Peel's waiting arms," Zimmerman mispronounces this repeatedly. I began to wonder if she were thinking of The Avengers, or if I was just thinking too much of soccer stars. I had just finished rereading Margaret Young's "Hanauma Bay" and asked her. She assures me the goddess's name is pronounced pay-lay. Did no editor listen for typos? This is a minor issue, except the books emphasize how much research Gardner does, and paying no attention to pronunciation takes away from the story's credibility.

Another place that could have used a good editor is in ch. 14, of Pearls and Peril at the end of an interesting section where Allison is held captive in a strange island house. Gardner has emphasized repeatedly that Allison's captor will not let her see his face, only hear his hypnotic voice. He tells her that If she will not try to look at him he will unfold the mystery to her. He is sitting behind her as Allison eats, or stuffs her food under the cushion -- having determined that he has been drugging her food. His words start sending her into shock. Suddenly, she "shove[s her] elbow into Scarlotti's midsection" then slams a handy "heavy silver vase" over his head and flees. I listened repeatedly to that section to find out where he moves from behind her to in front of her and couldn't find it. I made a note "I haven't been able to check this against the book, so perhaps something got lost in the abrdgmnt. Was there no editor to take a listen?"

Indeed, something was lost in the abrdgmnt. The book reads "I shoved my elbow back into Scarlotti's midsection" (131). Reading that I realize that if you're going to shove your elbow you have to shove it back, that's how your arm works. I also realize that the action moves so fast that the story needs that word back to slow the action down, to emphasize the character's positions relative to each other. I also realize that I wasn't altogether off-base wondering when Scarlotti moved.

For Allison to elbow Scarlotti hard enough to knock his wind out they both have to be standing, and he has to be close behind her, or perhaps bending over her, but Scarlotti has moved off to the side (129, par. 5) when Allison tells him she won't try to escape if he won't sit so close. Arrange two chairs, one behind and off to the side of the other. How close does the back chair have to be for you to elbow the other person hard enough to knock the wind out? But there's a complication. Allison is at a table of some sort. She has to be in order to have a surface big enough to both hold a plate and a handy "heavy silver vase" she can smash over the head of someone falling forward. How fast can she push her chair out from under the table and leap away? The scene works better if she and Scarlotti are both standing. But whether they are or not we haven't been told enough to see where they are relative to each other. Was there no editor to listen and read here?

Bear with me for one more small example. At one point someone says, "The evil men do return to haunt the children." Since the speaker is talking about Scarlotti's father bringing evil upon his son, the sentence should be "The evil men do returns to haunt the children." The -s suffix makes a big difference. Worse, Michelle Zimmerman emphasizes do so that I had listened to that sentence 5 times looking for another action transition before I realized the sentence wasn't saying, "The evil men indeed return to haunt the children."

Is it unreasonable to ask for better editing on an $11.98 cassette? I generally like Michelle Zimmerman's reading (Kathryn Laycock Little's reading of Emeralds and Espionage is outstanding), but it would have been much better with a little editing. Are there expenses in publishing a tape that make it prohibitive to redo sections like one would redo takes in a film? Perhaps Kent Larsen could enlighten us? Or perhaps Marvin Payne or someone else who has recorded books. (A good two-part story on audio books aired on NPR's All Things Considered, June 15 and 16, 1999 www.npr.org.)

Well, gentle reader, if you aren't sick of this, there's more to follow. I'm supposed to be reviewing Sapphires and Smugglers, book 5, and the library just called. Diamonds and Danger finally came in. Maybe Allison and Bart will get to finish their honeymoon (What do they want from me, Allison wonders about all the people chasing her and Bart, "What you've got, they can't have,'" he teased, pulling me into the bed.") and Allison will get to read the Book of Mormon. And maybe I'll get to discuss something I haven't yet, how Gardner handles sex. That's a treat.

[1]Repeating a word in a different form, or using words from the same root close together. A favorite word, I used to sing it as a song, "Me and my polyptoton asyndeton the avenue." Gardner uses so many rhetorical figures I suspect she has a copy of something like Willard Espy's The Garden of Eloquence. Cynthia Hallen has a good guide to figures of speech at http://humanities.byu.edu/classes/ling230ch/index.html.

Harlow Soderborg Clark