Book Review: Hard Rain or “Man This Guy is Good”

When I was younger, teenage years, one of my favorite authors was Pat Conroy. I loved reading the Prince of Tides, Lords of Discipline, The Water is Wide and The Great Santini. I thought that Conroy had a lyrical voice and style that was engaging and interesting to read. In college I found the same style in James Dickey of Deliverance fame. Serendipidous then that I have run across Barry Eisler and his John Rain series. Hard Rain in this the second book of Eisler's that I've read and this series of his is easily my favorite series of the moment. His prose, particularly in the first chapters, are incredibly rich and he uses a vocabulary that makes you think. Perfect to read on a Kindle with a dictionary application. The story and plot are gruesome, his main character is an anti-hero, an assassin who although a murderer and killer is out to do good, but the story is wide in scope and has a tight POV that keeps me wanting to read more.

First the vocabulary. A majority of these came in the first thirty pages. Makes me think about all those books on writing where-in they tell you to make the first few chapters as perfect as you can make them. Sadly, the twenty-five cent words trailed off throughout the book.

Demimonde - A class of women kept by wealthy lovers or protectors; women prostitutes considered as a group; a group whose respectability is dubious or whose success is marginal.

Antedeluvian - Of or relating to the period before the flood described in the Bible; made, evolved, or developed a long time ago; extremely primitive or outmoded an antediluvian prejudice.

Ambit - Circuit, compass; the bounds or limits of a place or district; a sphere of action, expression, or influence : scope.

Anodyne - Serving to alleviate pain; not likely to offend or arouse tensions : innocuous.

Solipsistic - A theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing; also : extreme egocentrism.

Amanuensis - One employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript.

Quotidian - Occurring every day; belonging to each day; commonplace, ordinary.

Fulgent - Dazzlingly bright : radiant.

Soporific - Causing or tending to cause sleep, tending to dull awareness or alertness; of, relating to, or marked by sleepiness or lethargy.

Some lines that caught my eye.

First, despite the sometimes lowly descriptions, Eisler, a westerner, describes Tokyo in such a way that I can't wait to go visit it. Here is his description of a cemetery in Tokyo:

"I moved deeper into the comforting gloom, along a stone walkway covered in cherry blossoms that lay like tenebrous snow in the glow of lamplights to either side. Just days earlier, these same blossoms had been celebrated by living Tokyoites, who came here in their drunken thousands to see reflected in the blossom's brief and vital beauty the inherent pathos of their own lives. But now the blossoms were fallen, the revelers departed, even the garbage disgorged by their parties efficiently removed and discarded, and the area was once again given over only to the dead."

Then this:

"Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electric wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes."

Finally, after he has used a disguise to kill someone, the hero, John Rain, gets rid of the elements of his disguise by leaving it for the homeless:

"Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origin, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless colorless souls, the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to time into Tokyo's collective blind spot and from there into oblivion."

I wrote about a Nero Wolfe story I read wherein Archie describes then watches a character continually replace his glasses ontop of his nose. Eventually Archie's narration boils down to nothing more than his saying, "specs again" or "glasses" and the reader knows exactly what the author is referring to. Eisler does a similar thing as Rain watches the people with whom he interacts, in this case catching someone lying, something I've always been intrigued by.

"He glanced to his left, which for most people is a neurolinguistic sign of recall rather than of construction. Had he looked in the opposite direction, I would have read it as a lie."

Then much later all Eisler has to write is the following, and the reader knows what he is referring to:

"He glanced to his right. The glance said, think of something."

Loved reading this book. Not quite as good as the first if only because the reader can tell that the first was meant as a singleton, and this is an expansion of a story that came to a nice tight end with book one. That being said, I look forward to reading the next in the series.