Heat Wave plays with fiction, fiction, and reality
By Jouvon M. Evans
Lance Writer
January 20, 2010
 Heat Wave
Richard Castle
Hyperion
208 pages
$25.99
With the recent release of ABC’s television show Castle Season 1 on DVD, the company concurrently released this epic tome of fiction.
For fans, the grand appeal of Nathan Fillion (of Firefly and Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Along Blog fame) and the emphasis on cute flirtation with his co-star Stana Katic are enough to make this book a must have.
Just take a peer at the reviews on Amazon.com where fans voted and reviewed as generally enthralled with their purchase. This despite the discrepancy between the width of the paperback Nikki is seen enjoying in a bubble bath compared to this slim hardcover.
There’s no denying this book is a fun romp for the imagination through the routine drill of a crime and capture television series as events unfold, beginning with its cheesy cinematic title.
Indeed, New York City is going through a heat wave, threatening to drive citizens crazier than usual while a cool, calculating murder case refuses to be solved when it has more twists at each clue than the NYC subway system.
Detective Nikki Heat, who suffers from a blatant problem in her less than subtly alluded to past and an insufferable name given to double entendres, has Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jameson Rook following her around on special permission from the mayor and with a certain sexual appeal she can’t shake.
And here is where the book separates the experience from television fans and pure literary connoisseurs of the detective with murder mystery genre.
The play between fiction and fiction and reality is complex and frankly, trippy.
Heat nor her gang aren’t too much different from their personalities on the show, to which at certain points fans are going to have to remind themselves that these characters have never been real despite the interplay between a sort of fictional reality and utter fiction.
Also, the author has written himself into his own book as the Rook persona interjected with Richard Castle’s personality that is ghostwritten by an unconfirmed source.
Even the fictional author Castle cannot write about himself objectively. Rook often makes quick switches between clown and idiot savant, and unfortunately lacks the grace which Fillion possesses on the show to give wit to the transitions for Castle.
Nor is Rook balanced by the family characters that round out the cast of the show.
There is too much character and not enough of the writer that the show describes to their viewer.
This reading experience is a play between the reader and the viewer because both are being appealed to. The book best succeeds with the faithful viewer but casual reader.
For the genre connoisseur, this book may be a bit of an affront the way jazz may still offend opera’s senses.
The narrative style is blunt in an attempt to show how tough Heat is and instead comes off as hammering of the character’s thoughts and emotions, which seem to be simple ramifications as a Disney manufactured teenage starlet, to the reader.
Heat’s speech is slangy, direct, blunt, and funny, but lacks the grit of a hardened detective. She has a passion for victim empathy that Kate Beckett shares on the television show.
This is a female character written by a man who doesn’t know the details that bring women to life. If by page 92 she still has to be called by her full name in order to be identified, she’s not a strong enough protagonist yet.
The writing is so genial to the reader that one can either appreciate that sort of television rating during sweeps week general appeal or hate it.
There were moments of the unique flavour of a particular and detailed work but they were rare.
The occasional interesting detail of police procedural tempts us with wanting more, but that is usually dismissed in an uninteresting glossing over to a quick quip.
This could have been the unique angle the Castle books would take that might justify a series of books by great ghostwriters. The kind that sell millions of Star Wars books. Instead, the opportunity is wasted on the modern references to quick fads and tequila that will make this book more of a gimmick than a serious novel.
The ghostwriter, for this is certainly neither Fillion nor Castle’s work, has a sharp, jagged style reminiscent of fast television editing and pacing. Often times, characters skip past hours and through locations with little explanation.
It’s rumoured that the ghostwriter may be a writer (or several writers) of the actual show, which would clarify the quickness of certain aspects of the book while other descriptions like the fighting and sexing scenes (of which there are plenty of some and build-up to others) can be electric.
Heat Wave adds depth to a show that hardly requires it. And worse, it suffers from imitation of the fast television format.
You know who this ghostwriter reminds me of? Stephanie Meyer, author of Twilight. It isn’t great writing evoking the next great American novel but it’s fun.
And sometimes, just sometimes, a book is just a book that is a book, if you get what I mean. |
