[easyazon_image add_to_cart=”default” align=”left” asin=”B00J8R3QMK” cloaking=”default” height=”160″ localization=”default” locale=”US” nofollow=”default” new_window=”default” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EDn7fFZwL._SL160_.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”106″]Page 2: William Giraldi – Hold the Dark: A Novel
Hold the Dark revolves around a dark center, a great black hole that pulls everything into its orbit. The augurs who whisper fated destruction and the people who put on masks to kill both testify to a mythical spirit of evil that makes intellectual beggars of those who try to understand it. Human minds are overwhelmed by violence; the indifferent face of nature with bloodied maw and the silhouette of a man holding a hunting knife converge in the excess of evil, indistinct and impossible to parse according to categories of “natural” and “moral” in the mind of the person choking in its grip.
Our bedraggled hero Russell Core is a tired man when he arrives in Alaska; the region’s police are smooth-faced and completely unprepared for what repeatedly befalls them. By contrast, our villains are cool and steady; they act with constant purpose and never show signs of being rattled. They have every advantage, as the shattered bones and spilled organs of so many victims attest. They are unified with nature and are at home in it; Core, Marium, and other representatives of order are out of place, beset, and at constant risk of annihilation.
Where then is goodness in this book? How are we to understand it here: its wispy and fleeting nature, its dissipation like smoke trailing out of the end of a rifle bore?
The truth is that Giraldi has written with faithfulness to the sort of goodness we find in our own world when confronted by horrors of this magnitude: It is weak and uncertain, inflected with a survival instinct that bends it out of shape. If morality is cast in the safe and warm confines of polite society, it is liable to shatter when it arrives in a frozen wasteland; the shock of evil is tremendous.
Not only does this approach cling to the contours of goodness in evil times, it also creates the potential for transformation. Goodness, perhaps, needs to be murdered and resurrected in order to take its true form; it needs the affront and undergoing of horrendous evil—a phrase borrowed here from Marilyn McCord Adams—in order to be proven as what it claims to be.
I won’t tell of the machinations that drive this book through to its end, or of the revelations that may arrive in those remote and frozen places, but I will say this: the challenge of evil and destruction in a book like this is a sign of the fiction having a serious moral quality. Giraldi’s remarkable achievement is in conveying this challenge through crackling prose while keeping his barreling plot under tight control. There are many horrors in these pages, but there are glimmers of hope, too, and plenty to feast on besides.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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