Tim Davys – Amberville

39. Amberville by Tim Davys, translated by Paul Norlen (2007 in Swedish; 2009 in English)

Length: 343 pages

Genre: Mystery, I guess?

Started: 09 April 2009
Finished: 12 April 2009

How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 12 February 2009

Many thanks to Kevin Callahan from Harper Collins for sending me this book to review!

Stuffed animals who
drink, swear, and die. These aren’t toys
we’re talking about!

Summary: One day, Nicholas Dove, a local crime boss, breaks down the door of Eric Bear, a successful advertising executive with a checkered past, and demands the impossible. He’s heard rumors that his name is on the infamous Death List, and he wants Eric to find out if it’s true, and to remove his list before the Chauffers come in their mysterious red pickup truck and take him away. If Eric fails to do as Nicholas asks, his beloved wife, Emma Rabbit, will be torn to pieces. Eric must reacquaint himself with his buddies from his time in the underworld, and somehow find the Death List – a fact made much more difficult by the fact that no one is willing to admit such a thing even exists.

Oh, and did I mention? They’re all stuffed animals. Yeah.

Review: While the plot summary reads as though this is a straight-up hardboiled noirish mystery, it’s actually more of a treatise (the back cover uses the word “allegory”, which I’ll get back to later) on the nature of good and evil, life and death, and religion and society. However, none of the conclusions that Davys reaches are particularly profound – not that they’re not cogent, and not that I didn’t agree with him for the most part, but I’m not sure I got much insight out of this book that I didn’t get during my existential undergraduate phase. While the philisophical musings and the story didn’t always intermesh cleanly, both were interesting enough to keep me involved, and the writing itself was fine, adept at shifting narrative voice, and descriptive enough to give me a good feel for the world these animals were moving through.

Whenever I have this experience, part of me always wonders if the points that are being made are actually just *so deep* that I didn’t get them, philistine that I am. Because in this case, I know that I certainly didn’t get a large part of the story – the stuffed-animal aspect. If this is where the allegory comes in, I totally missed it. This story could just as easily have been told with humans, and because the fact that they were stuffed animals never really tied into the main point of the story, it wound up just feeling gimmicky. An effective gimmick – it sounded original and cool enough to get me to read it in the first place – but in the end it didn’t quite have the substance to back up its initial claims. Ultimately, I think that sums up my experience with the book – it felt like it was trying to be original and edgy and deep, and while it wasn’t an uninteresting read, it never quite hit the mark. 3 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: True fans of hardboiled crime fiction might appreciate the twist on the genre more than I did. For everyone else: if you come across it, it’s an interesting and relatively easy read, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to seek it out.

This Review on LibraryThing | This Book on LibraryThing | This Book on Amazon

Links: Amberville home page

Here’s the book trailer – effective, no?

Other Reviews: Fantasy Book Critic
Have you reviewed this book? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: Early one morning at the end of April there was pounding on the door to Eric Bear and Emma Rabbit’s apartment on brick-red Uxbridge Street.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 287: “The bear was fingering a small etui that he had in his trouser pocket.” – a small, often decorative case, esp. one for needles, toilet articles, or the like
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