Redemption - Will Jordan

Since I really enjoy the Critical Drinker’s You Tube videos I felt I should give one of his books a try – written under his real name Will Jordan (I think). An action scene and a soldier apparently dying in the desert got me into the book, then other stuff kicked me out. It started to drag a few chapters in with character sketches and scene setting. Much of this seemed to consist of laborious info-dumps and I felt this writer had failed to grasp the basic principle of ‘show don’t tell’. At least this was my initial impression and I put the book aside.

But then the internet came to the rescue by crashing in my Cretan village for ten days. I’d managed to download some books during a brief spell when it came back on again but, since I seem to be on a reading jag I was soon scrabbling round for more to read. So I thought I’d give Redemption another go.

It seemed I’d opted out of the book just before the good stuff started. What I got thereafter was an action thriller right through to the end with characters that grew on me along the way. Sure, the hero Ryan Drake annoyed me with his vulnerabilities and I felt he could do with the occasional kick up the arse. Some scenes slid into bathos and/or had the emotional sensibility of, well, a neophyte writer. I also have to add that it was a source of amusement to me that the character Anya was a kick-ass, zero-compromise petite blond woman who could kill trained soldiers with her bare hands. Contrast that to the Critical Drinker’s take on Hollywood boss-bitches. However, other characters, like Dietrich, had an arc that was a joy to read. The action scenes were spot on and I suspect well researched, just as were the locations. And the story itself  (after that initial phase) rolled on at a good pace and came to a satisfying conclusion with, of course, a nice scattering of hooks to pull the reader into the next book.

Thinking about my initial reaction to this book I realized that just because Will Jordan as the Critical Drinker is high profile doesn’t mean he was never a new writer labouring through his first book. We do tend to be more critical of those who are in the limelight and in some way successful – a lot less forgiving. This also being the first time I’ve gotten so deep into reading for the best part of a decade, maybe my reading mojo wasn’t up to speed when I started it. It could also be that the critical facility Jordan applies to films was applied here in his first book with a heavy hand. He was being too meticulous about laying the groundwork from which the story springs, and he was ‘telling’ us stuff about characters they later ‘showed’ us.

However many years ago Jordan wrote it, Redemption was a good start. I will try the next book in the series on the assumption that the faults I mentioned will go away. And I do want to know where this story and these characters are going.      

Internet Break

My internet is not always 100% either in the UK or on Crete. Sometimes is slows down so that loading circle appears in the middle of watching something and sometimes it disconnects completely. I suppose it might be due to a hundred million Americans waking up and checking their phones, or a mouse ate a wire somewhere or the sun decided to thwack a burst of radiation in our general direction. It can be irritating but, generally, never lasts for long.

On Crete since I’ve been here the internet dropping out was becoming more and more noticeable then, last week, it shut off completely. I expected it to come back on sometime later, as always, and so filled in time reading some Greek. It didn’t come back on and when I stepped outside my neighbour asked me if I had internet. No. And that seemed to be the case for the whole village. 

I learned that the provider was having technical problems. Okay, whatever – my problem was not getting the service I was paying for. Various people in the village phoned up the provider to complain. I got on with other things: learning Greek, writing and reading books. When the internet fired up again, rather than check my emails, my first thought was to buy and download some more books. Good thing I did because the thing went off again. I went to the shop where I signed up for the internet and complained. They were sales of course and I needed to phone a certain number to find out what was going on. It was the same number others had been calling and being told it’ll be fixed in two hours. Now it turns out this ‘technical issue’ requires some equipment to be shipped from Athens.

You’d think I’d be angry. I was initially but that soon faded. Now with over a week having passed since the internet first dropped out I’m glad. It has been a real eye-opener for me just how mentally disruptive is the constant flood of information at the touch of a screen. It fills the mind up with incomplete equations, hundreds of images, fragments and blobs of information and the angry shouting of the mob. Without that option there I can think more clearly, enjoy books more and generally feel a lot calmer. I’ve even been contemplating the idea of doing without that flood and using the internet maybe once a week at a café in Sitia. 

But I know that once all those lights are lit up on the modem I’ll be back to scrolling, sucking up fragments and getting annoyed at things over which I have no influence at all.

However, I have been becoming less and less inclined to use the information drug. I think this has a lot to do with a general boredom with social media – I’ve become jaded with it.  I make sure to get 200 words down before I even look. I tend to read and post articles and watch informative videos rather than scroll now. And I definitely don’t bother arguing with strangers online. This brief outage has pushed me further in the direction of away – away from the madding crowd.