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Aftershock | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Chuck Scarborough | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
I grew up with Chuck Scarborough. He is, or at least was, a pretty prominent news reporter in the New York City area. So when I saw this on the shelves, with his name big and bold on the cover, and with such a cool concept - big earhquake hits Manhattan - I thought it would be great. Alas, no.
The premise, silly as it sounds, it actually plausible. There are faults running near and under NYC, and there is geologic activity. So I can't grade him down on that. The problem is with the story itself, and how he presents it.
Like most books of this type, the story starts out with various scenes of normal life for various characters. There are also depictions of warnings both human and electrical that go unheeded if they're noticed at all. And interspersed with all that are vignettes showing the buildup of pressure along the fault lines. It's all meant to build tension, but all it did for me was make me impatient. I wanted to scream, "Get on with it, already!" multiple times.
And finally, it does. And that's when the problems really come out of the woodwork.
Unlike most other kinds of disasters, earthquakes are very short. Even tornadoes last longer. So it's not really possible to spend chapters and chapters focusing on the event itself, showing damage happening and people's reactions as they run for safety or try to save other people like might be portrayed in, say, a hurricane. But you can certainly spend more than a paragraph to say the earth shook!
There is no main story for the book. For most of it the plight of one particular family might be considered the main focus, especially since they were so prominent in the prologue. But at the time of the quake they're all seperated, so it is not a story of the family but of the individual members, which just turns them into four more characters in the book. Whether NYC will get the funding it needs to rebuild might be considered the main focus, especially in the latter half of the novel, but that political struggle doesn't really get enough stage time to garner the label of main plotline. So the book is nothing more than following a dozen or so people around as they struggle to do whatever.
And some of the characters are poorly chosen, or poorly shown. Sam is a... a scientist, or a writer, or something. It was never clear to me. But he knows a heck of a lot about earthquakes, and has been warning people for years that the big one might strike the east coast instead of the west. But his knowledge is never really used, either in the story or in narrative exposition about what had happened.
The NY governor has, in the book at least, wanted for years to cut off all support for the city. Perhaps this was true in real life as well; Scarborough would certainly be in a position to know. But it is never explained to the readers in the rest of the country why he wants to cut it off, why he wants to fund rescue only so much as to evacuate the city and not rebuild at all. It makes no sense to me, and it would have been nice to hear a little about why, other than, "It's a sin-riddled hellhole, so let's get rid of it once and for all," type of thinking.
Even less believable is that the governor is a Democrat. I can't imagine any Democrat giving up the notion of taxing the country more so they can help a specific group of people. It's the Republicans who are arguing that the city needs to be rebuilt, not abandoned! But the real Republicans are against greater taxes. Scarborough got the political roles entirely reversed. But at least we now know which party he belongs to.
Those are the big problems, but there are some others. Sam warns the mayor that tsunamis are coming. But other than one sentence much later on, we'd never know it. They aren't shown at all, and I feel Scarborough missed a great opportunity there. Similarly, the governor resists sending out the National Guard for various political reasons, and the army won't arrive until dawn the next day. Major rioting, looting, and general breakdown of order is expected. But almost none is portrayed. Another lost opportunity. And throughout the whole book, there is almost no emotion. Things happen. People do stuff. But when people get angry or sad or whatever he just writes, "He was angry." No attempt to evoke a similar response in the reader, at all.
Despite all these problems, it's not that bad a book. It's just not all that good, either. The depiction at the end of the proposed new New York (Newer York?) is actually very nice, and I'd love to see it built. But this is still a story filled with lost opportunities. It could have been a heck of a lot more dramatic than it is.
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