BOOK & BLOG

August 8, 2005

Book of the Week: John Twelve Hawk's The Traveller

The basic premise of John Twelve Hawk’s THE TRAVELLER is that the world is divided into Drones -- people like most of us who don’t watch what’s going on around us, don’t understand that we’re under constant surveillance, and don’t care that our basic goals are materialistic and non-spiritual: and three groups of people who understand this all too well – the Travellers, the Harlequins, and the Tabula. The Tabula’s job is to find the Travellers (who can leave their own skin and go to other worlds) and eliminate them, and the Harlequins’ job is to defend the Travellers at all cost.

Maya, one of the few remaining Harlequins, is prompted by the death of her father to become active in her calling and defend two Travellers, the brothers Michael and Gabriel Corrigan. The sacrifices they make to keep their faith alive are the most impressive part of THE TRAVELLER.

Twelve Hawks is an interesting and compelling storyteller, but the worldview of this book is not a comforting or comfortable one. If this book had been written by a romance writer, it would have been a predictable read. But Twelve Hawks is more interested in tough choices and what they say about our character. I’m having a hard time understanding why the Tabula is so bent on the destruction of the Travellers. Either that’s just my limitation, or Twelve Hawks plans a further explanation in the two other books he plans to write about the same world.

Entry of the Week

I’ve been listening to DEAD AS A DOORNAIL on CD. The company that produced it, Recorded Books, had the courtesy to call me before they produced the book, to ask me how certain words were pronounced. I know from other writers that not all companies do this, and I wonder why. It’s a phone call, doesn’t take ten minutes, and a lot of good can come from it.

Listening to a book is a whole different experience from reading it. My husband and I enjoyed it all the way over to a neighboring town (dinner and a movie night) and back. The reader is so good! She got all the emphases right, she got the accent right (not the overdone southern accent you hear in a lot of movies), and she just seemed to “get” the book. What a treat.

On the downside, mistakes popped out at me – mistakes I made – that I’d never caught before. That’s always a downer. Theoretically, there shouldn’t be any mistakes of logic or circumstance in a book. A dress shouldn’t be blue in one scene and green in another. A character shouldn’t have a dead father in one book, only to have him resurrected in another.

The writer shouldn’t write them; or the editor should catch them; or the copy editor should catch them; or the writer should discover them when she gets the page proofs. But some do slip through, and the longer-running a series is, the more possible it is include errors. I worry about this a lot, but it seems inevitable that I’m going to make mistakes in my books. For one thing, I write them at speed, and then they go to press, so I’m never detached from the material enough to be objective. For another, most editors now are overworked. And some copy editors are much better than others.

I can only hope these mistakes don’t detract from the reading (or listening) experience for you, the reader. And for all of you who’ve had the pleasure of listening to this book, all I can say is, it really sounds good to me. There’s not a thing I’d change. Happy listening!