Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

In the interest of dis­clos­ure: The fol­low­ing post is a book review: I received a paper­back copy of the book for free as part of the Sum­mer Read­ing Chal­lenge. How­ever, I have received no pay­ment for the fol­low­ing review and all opin­ions given below are my own and are in no way influ­enced by the publisher.

Amberville — Tim Davys

Eric Bear thinks he has escaped his viol­ent past, but when crime boss Nich­olas Dove threatens Eric’s beloved wife Emma Rab­bit, Eric has no choice but to do what he asks: find a way to remove Dove’s name from the Death List.

Prob­lem is, no one knows if the Death List really exists. Nev­er­the­less, Eric gath­ers his old team together — sad­istic male pros­ti­tute Sam Gazelle, sweet but dan­ger­ous Tom-Tom Crow, and wily Snake Marek — and they set off to find the elu­sive list.
What Eric learns will forever change the way he thinks about his life, his fam­ily, and his town.
— ©Amazon

Amberville is a dark mystery-thriller filled with black­mail, extor­tion, drug use, viol­ence, pros­ti­tu­tion… and teddy bears.

See? I had you, didn’t I? Had you and then lost you again at the teddy bit — bear with me (no pun inten­ded), it’s worth it.

Depic­ted in a con­struc­ted world with its own geo­graphy, his­tory, reli­gion, cul­ture and altern­ate con­cepts of time and weather that often sub­verts or mir­rors our own, remin­is­cent of Pratchett’s Dis­cworld; Amberville focuses on the life of prot­ag­on­ist Eric Bear: a middle-aged, mar­ried, well-respected bear with a high-paid job at the head of a top advert­ising firm and a dark, dark past.

I love this sort of fic­tion; con­flic­ted char­ac­ters with shady pasts, dragged through the belly of an urban, seedy under­world — but this book is dif­fer­ent. It takes the fluffy, soft, harm­less­ness of cuddly toys and gives them a packet of cigar­ettes and a blow job. These aren’t cuddly toys, or rather they are, but the fact they’re made from fab­ric and stuff­ing is imma­ter­ial to the human-ness of their por­trayal. The genius in Amberville is in it’s abil­ity to allow you to sus­pend real­ity long enough to see past the sur­real nature of the world in which it is set and get sucked head-first into the story, the emo­tion, the char­ac­ters. In doing so, it gives you access to a grip­ping and sur­pris­ingly con­vin­cing jour­ney that exposes uni­ver­sal ques­tions and truths about life, death and cor­rup­tion that are alto­gether rel­ev­ant to our own world.

Amberville is well writ­ten and enga­ging — a fact worthy of note not just because of the unusual subject-matter, but because this book is in fact an Eng­lish trans­la­tion: the ori­ginal was writ­ten and pub­lished in Swedish. I usu­ally steer clear of trans­la­tions for fear of the author’s voice or inten­tion becom­ing lost in the trans­ition from one tongue to another, par­tic­u­larly as there are many an idiom that relies on culture-specific con­structs in order to work and many words and phrases in other lan­guages that do not have a suit­able Eng­lish equi­val­ent. How­ever, the only neg­at­ive con­sequence of the trans­la­tion appears to be the retain­ing of Euro-peculiar place names that serve to occa­sion­ally jar the reader out of the “fict­ive dream”. This is a great shame as it is evid­ent from the out­set that Davys works tire­lessly (and with con­sid­er­able suc­cess) in immers­ing the reader in this new world that con­jures Amer­ic­an­ised visu­als that are the bas­tard child of Who Framed Roger Rab­bit and a Mar­tina Cole novel. Unfor­tu­nately, the place-names had the per­petual effect of burst­ing my ima­gin­ary bubble and plonk­ing me in the assembly instruc­tions for a shelving unit from Ikea.

That said, I had a hard time put­ting this book down and found myself becom­ing increas­ingly engrossed until I just had to sit and fin­ish it — some­thing that I’ve struggled to do with books now for a few years, nor­mally run­ning out of steam long before I reach the end. The novel also makes use of multiple/alternating lim­ited nar­rat­ors, occa­sion­ally devi­at­ing from Eric’s account to slot in a chapter from other char­ac­ters. This is where the mys­tery ele­ment of the novel comes in as it is through these other voices that betrayal, deceit and con­flicts of interest are exposed; these threads become more and more entangled before build­ing to a series of twists at the end. (One of which I’d pretty much clocked by that point — unfor­tu­nate as I love a clever, unex­pec­ted twist — but it may work for you).

This is one I will be def­in­itely be read­ing again — although I now know the plot turns, I also know that there’s plenty of fore­shad­ow­ing and clever little nuances I missed the first time around that will make my second read­ing Amberville an even richer affair.

So cap­tiv­at­ing is Davys’ twis­ted, little furry uni­verse that should he choose to revisit Amberville in a second novel, I’d be eager to read it.

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