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New voice creates a blend that works surprisingly well
Book Review
By Derryll White
McLaughlin, James A, (2018). Bearskin.
James McLaughlin is a new voice, blending the natural world hunter/conservation officer slant of C.J. Box with the harsh brutality of Don Winslow’s drug cartels. It is a blend that works surprisingly well.
McLaughlin is careful, blending Rice the narrator’s previous life with the Mexican drug cartels with the present encounters with bear poachers. It is an unusual construct, calling for care in the writing and diction. The author is amazingly imaginative and singular with words the reader may not use or encounter in the daily world, but which make delightful sense. A gift direct to the reader!
McLaughlin has a clear sub-text running through the story. It is Rice’s/Rick Morton’s mantra – commit to success. One either commits, all-in, or one fails before even starting. The author weaves that thought through everything that happens, producing a hard, believable story. If you cannot push yourself to the limit and beyond, you fail. He also takes science and scientific thought and pushes it into mythic magic, a crenellation of natural, animistic, sensual discovery. McLaughlin demands that the reader think about the world in different terms.
Transition lays at the heart of ‘Bearskin.’ Man and woman can be schooled to change. To open to new circumstance. The human animal can react on pure neural information, embracing base instinct and the natural world to perform acts not in the common lexicon of an individual. I appreciated that James McLaughlin pushed hard enough in this story to make me understand that.
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Excerpts from the novel:
NATURAL ORDER – His neck ached, and when he took off a glove and reached up to touch below his ear he felt another quick jab of pain, like getting stung again. Something came away under his fingernail. A bulb of bee guts, attached to a tiny barbed stinger. All these bees had jammed their stingers into his skin and pulled away, leaving behind vital organs, and flown off to die. What a system. The stinging bees were females, nonbreeding kamikazes all – apparently their individual survival meant little enough. He held the stinger in the sunlight, close to his face, looking for his future there, extispicy in miniature.
STRANGER – He’d been warned when he took the job, but the occasional flash of local hostility still surprised him. As the caretaker of the Turk Mountain Preserve, he represented wealthy outsiders and a preservation ethic that seemed nonsensical and elitist to the locals. The hostility was apparently bad enough it had driven his predecessor to leave the job.
BEARS – “Recently though, we’ve heard unofficial reports that hunters in some areas are being offered up to two hundred dollars for bear gallbladders and paws. The paws, which (unlike bile) can’t be extracted on an ongoing basis from captive bears, are used to make soup and other delicacies – these are featured in trendy East and Southeast Asian restaurants popular with the newly affluent and a certain type of tourist.”
LANDSCAPE – When the birds flew from the cliff, Rice flew with them, swimming impossibly through the vast invisible air, a moment of vertigo as the creek flashed by far below, the treetops, clouds in the endless sky, then a gathering pause – a syncopation, a skipped heartbeat, an intake of breath – and some great cosmic valve opened, a vision of the gorge exploding in his mind, all of it at once, in every color, infrared through ultraviolet, everything was alive, speaking in a billion voices, a phantasmagoria of undreamed presences, the planet’s magnetic field itself vivid and pulsating around him.
– 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.
