The Master Planets (Book) - 9/13/2008 3:40:27 AM
I just don't know where to start with this book. It's huge in scope, deep in concept, beautifully written, and an enormously FUN READ that grabs you from the first paragraph, takes you from WW II to the 1970s rock scene to the modern world of high finance, and holds you straight through to a deeply satisfying conclusion. How did Gallinger pull it off, that's what I want to know?
We start out with a tense exchange between Daniel Gilaad, an elderly Israeli ambassador, and Peter Jameson, a handsome, fabulously rich, less-than-ethical New York corporate attorney. The ambassador wants Peter to take part in an event honoring his mother, who had been a partisan fighter in WW II Poland. In the course of the conversation, we begin to see that she had been a rather unique fighter -- and that this "uniqueness" followed her into her new life as a middle-class American wife and mother. We also see glimmerings of how the attorney's own life was twisted by the events that took place many years before he was born.
In the summer of 1973, Peter, a buoyant, handsome, rock wunderkind, had already written two songs -- "The Battle of Britain" and "Oh Laurie" -- that would become rock and roll classics. His band, The Master Planets, was gaining rapt attention across the country for the newness and heat of its music. Then came the suicide of his beautiful and withdrawn mother, and, quickly following, an avalanche of bewildering information about her identity and history as a war survivor. Far from being just another of the innumerable victims of the camps, she had in fact fought with the partisans against the Germans... and exacted retributions of a barbarity rivaling the Nazis' own. She committed numerous acts of bloody revenge. She also saved scores of lives. Shaken by the truth about the woman they thought they knew, Peter's family began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, Peter's talent -- the creative force that had defined, directed, and sustained his life -- suddenly deserted him.
Today Peter Jameson reflects again on the destruction of his family and the dissolution of his dreams. Now a ruthless attorney for international consortiums tied to organized crime, he has embraced his own brand of violence against humanity. The life he lives is far from what he imagined in his exuberant youth, and leaves him with a single, burdensome question: How to reconcile an intimate knowledge of human brutality with the heart's irrational urge to believe again, to desire, to reach out once more toward possibility?
This book is at once an action-based story and a meditation on the costs of violence and revenge. When does self-defense become atrocity, the victim a perpetrator? What happens to us when we cross that line? Spanning five decades in 336 short pages, in beautiful prose that manages to read like a mystery novel, the book explores one man's struggle with a legacy of evil, the search for meaning in the midst of ugliness. It is, simply put, one of the best debut novels I have ever read. Have a look -- you will NOT be disappointed.
