The Delicate Beast
The boy lives with his family, enjoying a life of wealth and privilege in the Tropical Republic in the 1950s. This lifestyle ends abruptly when the Mortician begins his rule and unleashes his undisciplined army to terrify the population into submission. The boy’s grandfather is arrested and narrowly escapes, a broken man. Other men ‘disappear’, leaving families searching, devastated, for months. The boy sees dead bodies thrown in the road.
He and his parents and brother are fortunate to escape to a new life in the United States, physically unharmed. He grows up, now referred to as Robert Carpentier, and travels to Paris to study. He feels detached from life in the US and in Paris, only starting to feel comfortable when a friend takes him to Greece where he can swim at beaches near Athens. It is there he meets Eve, and he falls in love. But this is not a romance. The shadows of his past envelop him. He continues to be unable to feel a sense of belonging; he has become a difficult man, isolating himself from a caring family.
The author increases the immediacy of this novel by writing in the present tense and close third person. He uses a minimum of dialog, relying on long, descriptive paragraphs to intensify the depth and breadth of the psychological wounds inflicted on a boy who has suffered no obvious physical harm. Especially effective is the extended metaphor of his friend Sebastian’s death, which drives home the point of man’s inability to escape his past. He is indeed ‘a delicate beast’.
This novel is intense, with each moment, each character given full value within the developing saga of Robert Carpentier. It is a landscape of time and place, tightly focused, accurately and flawlessly depicted.
