Book Review

By Derryll White

Haas, Derek (2008). The Silver Bear.

“YOU can control your future. YOU can bend it to your will.”

This is a first novel from Derek Haas. The protagonist is a deadly assassin who calls himself Columbus, while others name him the ‘Silver Bear.’ Columbus is the product of a politician and a prostitute, growing up in orphanages and foster homes, and getting hardened in the process.

Haas is good at creating the space and sensibility that allows for an assassin to exist. No friends, no ownership, nothing to be traced back. Columbus lives in our actionable present, without a past. He also works on the mind games, the space an assassin has to create so that he moves through his work unencumbered by the lives of his targets. Interesting stuff.

The author’s working thesis is that violence defines all men, that the reaction to violence is imprinted on the man. I agree. Years of fighting and biker clubs certainly left its imprint on me. I believe it made me a nicer, gentler man, having known the flip side intimately.

Derek Haas is extremely capable at concealing the ending of this novel. And the ending reveals the need he must have felt to do the book to make his statement. This is a quirky novel, different from most I have read, but I did enjoy it.

****

Excerpts from the novel:

ASSASSIN – I am a bad man. I do not have any friends. I do not speak to women or children for longer than absolutely necessary. I groom myself to blend, like a chameleon darkening the pigment against the side of an oak tree. My hair is cut short, my eyes are hidden behind dark glasses, my dress would inspire a yawn from anyone who passed me in the street. I do not call attention to myself in any way.

MEMORY – Joy and pain tend to make imprints on memory that do not dim, flecks & senses rather than images that resurrect themselves involuntarily and without warning.

THE PRESENT – The past does not interest me, though it is always there, just below the surface, like dangerous blurs and shapes an ocean swimmer senses in the deep. I am fond of the present. I am in command in the present. I am master of my own destiny in the present. If I choose, I can touch someone, or let someone touch me, but only in the present. Free will is a gift of the present; the only time I can choose to outwit God. The future, your fate, though, belongs to God.

PLACE – Clouds hang like a ceiling over downtown Seattle, low and gray and threatening. To the south, Mt. Rainier fills the horizon like a wart on the landscape. Something about it seems foreign here, wrong, like it broke away from a mountain chain and moved off to sulk on its own. This morning it is blindfolded, its peak lost above the clouds.

POLITICS – His voice is throaty; it arrives from deep down in his lungs. It is one of the reasons he has been so successful in politics; he is well-practiced in how he speaks, even if he doesn’t believe what he is saying.

POLITICIANS – “Politics… politicians… we don’t vote, we don’t make decisions, hell, we don’t even put on our own goddam shoes without someone telling us exactly what to do. Don’t you see? Too many people rely on us to feed the machine, too many people own every little part of us to let vice tether us down. Power isn’t in the big rooms in the Capital, it’s in the shadows and the corners and the dirty spaces under the rug.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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