Tuesday, August 13, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Westside by W.M Akers




Westside is a historical fantasy by W.M. Akers set in an alternate version of prohibition era Manhattan.  It's gotten a decent amount of press (most books I read don't score a review in the New York Times), so after initially passing it over for a library hold, I did request it a little more than a month back.  And after completing the book, it's definitely got the signs of a work that is well researched in its setting, and you can see the effort put in to getting the atmosphere right.

Unfortunately, everything else is a bit of a mess.  Westside starts with an interesting concept to put a different spin on a classic noir story and then quickly disgards that concept for a more typical noir story with fantasy complications....which only get more and more complicated themselves until they swallow everything in the narrative.  The book's lead character is well done, but everyone else is just kind of eh, and the plot just feels like the author couldn't decide what type of story he was telling at any given moment.


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Gilda Carr is a young woman in 1921 Manhattan, who makes her living in what many would see as an odd way: she's a private detective who only takes on the tiny mysteries of life: for example, searching for a matching glove gone missing for a wife desperate to avoid her deteriorating husband finding out she lost a precious present.  Gilda's father was once a street tough, and then one of Manhattan's most well known detectives....until he tried to solve the mystery of the Westside: the half of Manhattan where people and things started to disappear a few years back, as if into thin-air.  Hundreds and more were lost until the city gated off the Westside to prevent contamination, and Gilda's father's reputation was destroyed by his quest....until he too disappeared, leaving Gilda alone with her nanny.

But this latest mystery of Gilda's, that of the missing glove, soon spirals into something much much bigger, and she cannot avoid the pull for once of the big mystery.  For this mystery seems to involve everything: the disappearances of the Westside and what happened to her father, for instance.  And as Gilda investigates, she finds that all she knew of her father's past is not quite what it seems, and what's left of it threatens to destroy the Westside as she knows and loves it for good....
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Westside begins with the idea at first that it's in the category of "Noir with a twist," a fairly common genre I've found even though I don't go out of my way to read mysteries.  Gilda is your classical noir protagonist, the investigator hired by people who begins to find things are more than they seem, only she's investigating tiny mysteries, not big ones.  And then you have other characters who fit into the other classic archetypes: the mysterious client who is more involved than she claims, the family member pushing the investigator to cut her investigation short, the mob boss somehow involved, the politician with his own agenda, the crooked cop....etc.  Alas, the story never really follows through on that twist of tiny mysteries, since the only tiny mystery we see Gilda investigating turns into a big mystery pretty much from the beginning, turning this into classic noir with the fantasy twist of the mystery missing people and things of the Westside.

Where this works, and the book does work to a certain extent, is with Gilda as its central chracter.  Gilda is an excellent noir protagonist - inquisitive and always willing to go the extra mile to try and find the answers and to help her people, the people of Westside.  She's easy to root for, and to empathize with, and she definitely carries this story.  Alas, the rest of the side cast don't really manage to breakthrough their classic noir character archetypes.

The atmosphere of the Westside works as well in general, but it gets so tangled in the fantasy mysteries of the missing people and things (and the not-missing things that show up in the story) that it loses some of its power quite quickly.  And Westside gets so caught up in the fantasy elements near the end, with more and more complications coming into play, that it almost feels like a totally different novel than at the beginning, and it's not a particularly satisfying payoff: especially as the "why" everything happens the way it does is not particularly satisfying.  Like I said above the jump, it's a bit of a mess, with it feeling like the author had one idea - noir involving tiny mysteries! - then another - half of city is walled off because people and things start disappearing! - and then a third idea (MAJOR spoiler in ROT13) - Gurer'f n zhygvirefr bs Arj Lbexf jurer guvatf gung jbhyq bgurejvfr qvfnccrne pna rkvfg naq crbcyr jub qba'g rkvfg urer rkvfg!

The problem is that the result is that none of these ideas are particularly well explored in their implications and they're just....sort of there.  It results in the story feeling very generic by the end, which is a bit of a waste.  Ah well.
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