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Shutter
Island by Dennis Lehane Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Islands of the Mind Dennis Lehane’s new novel, Shutter
Island, will leave some readers thrilled with multiple twists and turns,
and leave other readers frustrated at the confusion between perception and
reality. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9, pp. 122-7: They
found the stones about a half mile inland as the sky rushed toward darkness
under slate-bottomed clouds. They came over soggy bluffs where the sea grass
was lank and slick in the rain, and they were both covered in mud from
clawing and stumbling their way up. A
field lay below them, as flat as the undersides of the clouds, bald except
for a stray bush or two, some heavy leaves tossed in by the storm, and a
multitude of small stones that Teddy initially assumed had come with the
leaves, riding the wind. He paused halfway down the far side of the bluff,
though, gave them another look. They
were spread across the field in small, tight piles, each pile separated from
the one closest to it by about six inches, and Teddy put his hand on Chuck's
shoulder and pointed at them. "How many piles do you count?" Chuck said, "What?" Teddy said, "Those rocks. You see 'em?" "Yeah.' "They're
piled separately. How many do you count?" Chuck gave him a look like the storm had found his
head. "They're rocks." "I'm serious." Chuck gave him a bit more of that look and then
turned his attention to the field. After a minute, he said, "I count
ten." "Me too." The mud gave way under Chuck's foot and he slipped,
flailed back with an arm that Teddy caught and held until Chuck righted
himself. "Can we go down?" Chuck said and gave
Teddy a mild grimace of annoyance. They worked their way down and Teddy went to the
stone piles and saw that they formed two lines, one above the other. Some
piles were much smaller than others. A few contained only three or four
stones while others had more than ten, maybe even twenty. Teddy walked between the two lines and then stopped
and looked over at Chuck and said. "We miscounted." "How?" "Between these two piles here?" Teddy
waited for him to join him and then they were looking down at it.
"That's one stone right there. Its own single pile." "In this wind? No. It fell from one of the
other stacks." "It's equidistant to the other piles. Half a
foot to the left of that one, half a foot to the right of that one. And in
the next row, the same thing occurs again twice. Single stones." "So?" "So, there're thirteen piles of rock.
Chuck." "You think she left this. You really
do." "I think someone did." "Another code." Teddy
squatted by the rocks. He pulled his trench coat over his head and extended
the flaps of it in front of his body to protect his notebook from the rain.
He moved sideways like a crab and paused at each pile to count the number of
stones and write it down. When he was finished, he had thirteen numbers:
18-1-4-9-5-4-23-1-12-4-19-14-5.
I "Maybe
it's a combination," Chuck said, "for the world's biggest
padlock." Teddy closed the notebook and placed it in his
pocket. "Good one." "Thank you, thank you," Chuck said.
"I'll be appearing twice nightly in the Catskills. Please come out,
won't you?" Teddy pulled the trench coat back off his head and
stood, and the rain pounded him again and the wind had found its voice. They walked north with the cliffs off to the right
and Ashecliffe shrouded to their left somewhere in the smash of wind and
rain. It grew measurably worse in the next half hour, and they pressed their
shoulders together in order to hear each other talk and listed like drunks. "Cawley
asked you if you were Army Intelligence. Did you lie to him?”
'I "I
did and I didn't," Teddy said. "I received my discharge from
regular army." "How'd you
enter, though?"
I "Out
of basic, I was sent to radio school." "And from there?" "A crash course at War College and then, yeah,
Intel'." "So how'd you end up in regulation
brown?" "I
fucked up." Teddy had to shout it against the wind. "I blew a
decoding. Enemy position coordinates." "How bad?" Teddy could still hear the noise that had come over
the radio. Screams, static, crying, static, machine gun fire followed by more
screams and more crying and more static. And a boy's voice, in the near
background of all that noise, saying, "You see where the rest of me
went?" "About half a battalion," Teddy shouted
into the wind. "Served 'em up like meat loaf." There was nothing but the gale in his ears for a
minute, and then Chuck yelled, "I'm sorry. That's horrible." They crested a knoll and the wind up top nearly
blew them back off it, but Teddy gripped Chuck's elbow and they surged
forward, heads down, and they walked that way for some time, bowing their
heads and bodies into the wind, and they didn't even nonce the headstones at
first. They kept trudging along with the rain filling their eyes and then
Teddy bumped into a slate stone that tipped backward and was wrenched from
its hole by the wind and lay flat on its back looking up at him. JACOB
PLUGH BOSUN'S MATE 1832-1858 A
tree broke to their left, and the crack of it sounded like an ax through a
tin roof, and Chuck yelled, "Jesus Christ," and parts of the tree
were picked up by the wind and shot past their eyes. They moved into the graveyard with their arms up
around their faces and the dirt and leaves and pieces of trees gone alive and
electric, and they fell several times, almost blinded by it, and Teddy saw a
fat charcoal shape ahead and started pointing, his shouts lost to the wind. A
chunk of something passed so close to his head he could feel it kiss his hair
and they ran with the wind battering their legs and the earth rising up and
chunking against their knees. A mausoleum. The door was steel but broken at the
hinges, and weeds sprouted from the foundation. Teddy pulled the door back
and the wind tore into him, banged him to his left with the door, and he fell
to the ground and the door rose off its broken lower hinge and yowled and
then slammed back against the wall. Teddy slipped in the mud and rose to his
feet and the wind battered his shoulders and he dropped to one knee and saw
the black doorway facing him and he plunged forward through the muck and
crawled inside. "You ever see anything like this?" Chuck
said as they stood in the doorway and watched the island whirl itself into a
rage. The wind was thick with dirt and leaves, tree branches and rocks and
always the rain and it squealed like a pack of boar and shredded the
earth. "Never," Teddy said, and they stepped
back from the doorway. Chuck found a pack of matches that was still dry in
the inside of the pocket of his coat and he lit three at once and tried to
block the wind with his body and they saw that the cement slab in the center
of the room was empty of a coffin or a body. either moved or stolen in the
years since it had been interred. There was a stone bench built into the wall
on the other side of the slab, and they walked to it as the matches went out.
They sat down and the wind continued to sweep past the doorway and hammer the
door against the wall. "Kinda pretty, though, hub?" Chuck said.
"Nature gone crazy, the color of that sky. . . You see the way that
headstone did a backflip?” "I gave it a nudge, but, yeah, that was
impressive." "Wow."
Chuck squeezed his pants cuffs until there were puddles under his feet,
fluttered his soaked shirt against his chest. "Guess we should have
stayed closer to home base. We might have to ride this out. Here.' Teddy nodded. "I don't know enough about hurricanes, but I get the feeling it's just warming up." "That wind changes direction? That graveyard's
going to be coming in here." "I'd still rather be in here than out
there." "Sure, but seeking high ground in a hurricane?
How fucking smart are we?" "Not very." "It was so fast. One second it
was just heavy rain, the next second we're Dorothy heading to Oz." "That was a tornado." "Which?" "In Kansas." "Oh." The squealing rose in pitch and Teddy could hear
the wind find the thick stone wall behind him, pounding on it like fists
until he could feel tiny shudders of impact in his back. "Just warming up," he repeated. "What do you suppose all the crazies are doing
about now?" "Screaming back at it," he said. They sat silent for a while and each had a
cigarette. Teddy was reminded of that day on his father's boat, of his first
realization that nature was indifferent to him and far more powerful, and he
pictured the wind as something with a hawk's face and hooked beak as it
swooped over the mausoleum and cawed. An angry thing that turned waves into
towers and chewed houses into matchsticks and could lift him in its grasp and
throw him to China. The differences between appearance and
reality are themes rampant in literature. Lehane tackles them with great
skill in Shutter
Island, and if it’s a psychological novel that suites your fancy this
Summer, be sure to read this one. Open the shutters of your mind, and let
Lehane in. Steve Hopkins, June 21, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Shutter
Island.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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