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Meet the aptly named Jack Perdu, a
lonely 14-year-old who lost his mother in a
mysterious, freak accident 8 years earlier. He and
his father live on the campus of Yale University
where his father is an archaeology professor.
Jack leads a quiet life, spending his free time helping one of the
Classics professors with his translation of Ovid's
Metamorphoses, until the fateful day when
Jack gets knocked down by a car and starts seeing
what he later understands are ghosts. A couple of
days later, his father sends him to New York to
visit a mysterious doctor; on the way home he meets
a young female ghost named Euri in the whispering
gallery of Grand Central Station and travels into
the Manhattan underworld with her - not the
underground but the underworld itself, where those
who die in New York with unfinished business spend
their days until eventually "moving on" to Elysium
(which is rumored to be "somewhere in the Hamptons").
After a slightly slow start, the story picks up
pace. In keeping with the Orpheus myth, upon which
The Night Tourist is obviously based, Jack
quickly realizes that he has just three days to
spend in the underworld, which means three days to
find his mother. To help him in his search, Euri
leads Jack on a whistle-stop tour of New York City
above and below ground (at dusk, the ghosts emerge
from the underworld through fountains in the city,
and spend the night living it up, before returning
to the underworld before dawn).
We go to the New York Central Library where
complimentary "Now That You're Dead" seminar's are
offered to newcomers by former mayor Fiorella La
Guardia, and take in a production of The
Producers, where ghosts who have failed to
pre-book crowd into the 'floating room
only' section. The underworld is a lively place, peopled with famous and infamous New
Yorkers, from corrupt police offer "Clubber"
Williams (see sidebar), who's found his perfect canine companion
in the three-headed dog Cerberus; to Dylan Thomas
who, from his barstool in
Chumley's, nightly reenacts the fatal drinking
binge that killed him.
If you're familiar with the
Orpheus myth, you'll have a good gist of how the
story will progress, but not without many unexpected
twists and turns, and an ending that, despite the
odds, manages to surprise. A couple of times,
convenience for the sake of the storyline takes the
place of credibility (would Jack's father really
have let him travel to and around New York by himself, knowing what he did about Jack?); but
such contrivances are few, and overall Marsh stays
true to the essence of the original story while
putting a modern and very witty spin on the timeless
themes of love, loss and longing.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in November 2007, and has been updated for the September 2008 edition. Click here to go to this issue.
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