Polar by T.R. Pearson

 

256 pages

You can buy Polar...Here

You can find out more about T.R. Pearson...Here

• The Blurb...

In their search for a missing toddler, Deputy Ray Tatum and his sometime girlfriend, Kit Carson, deal with an array of small-town foibles, follies, and characters in a story that stretches from Virginia to Antarctica. By the author of Blue Ridge

• My Review

Read this book after seeing recommended by the actor Peter Davidson of Doctor Who and All Creatures Great And Small fame on the TV show Between The Covers.

Curious book this one. On the surface, the plot is a simple one. A old redneck semi-pervert undergoes a sort of mental breakdown and develops a gift for prophesy that is an enigma to decipher. The local plod, laconic Ray Tatum, thinks that the backwoods nostradamus is dropping hints about a little girl that went missing a few years ago. And, well that's it. Our Gary Cooper/ James Stewart type hero doesn't go from clue to clue methodically unravelling a dastardly plot.

This book is more an examination of rust belt America and all the good and bad involved in it. It put the locals often comic lifestyles and attitudes up to a satirical mirror. 

What the author does have is a style all of his own. He does use two methods I found annoying. Instead of using the phrase " a man named Jones" he uses "a Jones" or "that Jones"  He uses this on numerous occasions for numerous people. Secondly he uses the word "evermore" in dialogue to mean anymore or forever. I would hazard a guess that these are colloquialisms from the area that he is writing about.

The storyline often wanders off on detours but never for too long before rejoining the narrative thread. Many of these sojourns are pointless but nonetheless often chuckle inducing. As I was reading along, due to the idiosyncratic writing I could not help myself. I just had to read in the style of the narrator voice over in the Dukes of Hazzard. Read the selected quotes and you'll see what I mean. It is very...American.

An interesting book but more for the unusual writing style rather than the story arc.

The style is laid back, verbose, socio-politically informed and darkly comic.

Glad I read it but don't know if I would be tempted to read another in the series.

• Selected Quotes

"Even as a younger woman, that Bolick was prone to be peevish and ill, but here in her golden years she has settled into accomplished sour displeasure which she sustains with an admirable rigor and impeccable thoroughness."

"That Gullick was merely a type that Ray had seen too awful much of by then— a citizen in the sorry latter- day American vein. He was staunchly opinionated and pretty exhaustively misinformed, got all of his news off the television where they’d rather be first than right and don’t so much own up to mistakes anymore as rework and improve them until, in any given moment, almost anything might be true."

"We’ve few black people about in the uplands, no people much of any dusky hue. There’s a black fellow out by Afton who finishes cement and a little nut- colored woman up by the salvage yard in a trailerhome. Mostly because we don’t know how else to go about it, we tend to talk to them like they’re simple, or at least not the sorts of people we like to think ourselves to be."

"Then, of course, there was his dog as well, an ancient mongrel named Monroe. She was sullen and unfriendly, greasy, matted and vaporish in a grand and foully intrusive sort of way. She broke treacherous wind, that is to say, with a kind of ceremony. She would still herself and hunker and tauten, and there would come upon her features an expression of devout concentration as if she were running the figures to reconcile the national debt in her head."

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Raylan by Elmore Lenoard

• About The Author...

Thomas Reid Pearson is an American writer born in 1956 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.Pearson was a student at North Carolina State University, where he earned a B.A. and M.A. in English. He went on to teach at Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina. He started work on a Ph.D. in Pennsylvania but soon returned to North Carolina, where he worked as a carpenter and a housepainter while he began writing his first two novels, A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter. Neither was published until 1985, when he moved to New York City, where both books were issued by Linden Press.

His novels are set in the South, in the imaginary small town of Neely, near Winston–Salem, or, in his recent novels, in the Appalachian areas of Virginia, where he now lives. His writing captures a uniquely Southern social order, outlook, and voice and has been compared to the work of Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

Perhaps most notable in Pearson’s style is his writing as if he were capturing a back-porch discussion of events, which leads to long sentences and paragraphs. His vivid humor is woven throughout his writing.

A Short History of a Small Place, Off for the Sweet Hereafter, The Last of How It Was, Cry Me a River, Polar and Blue Ridge were New York Times Notable Books.

Pearson also collaborated with John Grisham on early drafts of the screenplays for The Rainmaker (1997) and Runaway Jury (1998), films based on two of Grisham’s novels.

Pearson is married and lives in Virginia.