Alan Glynn: The Dark Fields

By LAURA KROETSCH*

Eddie Spinola is thirty-something. He works more or less unsuccessfully as a copywriter and lives in a marginal neighbourhood in New York City in an apartment he never cleans. The book he is supposed to be writing isn't happening. Eddie finds himself sitting in a bar drinking in the afternoon. Eddie needs help.

It comes in the form of Vernon Gant, a drug dealer peddling MDT-48, a drug that creates a feeling of alertness and well-being. When taking it you have no desire to smoke, drink or even eat. You feel great and when it's over, you feel okay, says Gant. He also claims that the drug is legitimate, so Eddie takes it.

The next day, Eddie goes to Gant's apartment for more MDT-48. He runs an errand for Gant and returns to find him with a bullet in his head. Eddie finds the drug stash and steals it, and so begins Alan Glynn's debut novel.

Eddie loves MDT-48. When taking the drug he can read and write at lightning speed, comprehend complicated ideas, and in a couple of weeks he re-creates himself as a Wall St maverick. He begins trading from his living room and eventually closes the single largest deal of the decade.

But MDT-48 has a dark secret, and soon Eddie is blacking out, an artist's wife is dead and Eddie's Russian loan shark is looking for more than money.

The Dark Fields is a novel about expectation and greed in New York. It questions the need to work a 100-hour week and still look healthy and on top of the game, whatever that game may be. Glynn is making a point: our expectations are unrealistic and possibly deadly.

The demon is corporate culture and the novel is filled with detail about the stock exchange and corporate mergers. The problem is that the story is supposed to be a thriller, and the parts that work best are the blackouts, the dead bodies, the desperation and the loan shark. The detail just slows it down.

It isn't that Glynn can't create tension, it's that he doesn't sustain it. The Dark Fields makes a point, but this reader at least wanted more story, less detail, less point.

Penguin

$34.95

* Laura Kroetsch is a Wellington reviewer.