The Ruins - A Little Review
I just hope, hope and pray, that I'm not too late.
Well, maybe 'praying' is a bit strong. I hope and strongly... wish, that I'm not too late.
At any rate, here we go.
The Ruins, by Scott Smith. The sort of book you might pick up in an airport, say, like, in Seattle, on a layover, trying to get back to Boston and the family, and you need something to take your mind off the long flight ahead. Something like a horror. Something in that number 1 slot on the bestsellers bookshelf at the airport Borders. The sort of book, once you're home, and that flight is no longer a concern, would be good to bring to the beach. The Ruins, by Scott Smith, and all signs pointing to it (the #1 bestseller, blurbs from good old Stephen King), led me to believe I'd be in for a great ride. After all, the last blurbed book I bought by Stephen King was Michael Marshall's The Straw Men, which was an excellent read (as are the Michael Marshall Smith books, back when the writer wrote those (and we name-checked him in our disclaimers). So it stood to reason: he has decent taste in authors. Or he only gives blurbs to authors with the surname "Smith." It's one of the two. William Murphy is, at this time, changing his pen name to William Murphy Smith.
Well, listen, and listen well, you soon-to-be summer readers! Originally, I was hoping to save Aussies from the same mistake that I made. After a bit of research, however, it seems The Ruins has been out and about for a year now. So the upside-down summer roared into the Antipodes and roared away, quite likely leaving a good deal of people down there Ruins-ified, as I would like to coin it.
So here's what we have: it's a story about a group of mid-twenty year olds, about to enter the working life after grad school. They're on holiday in Cancun, they meet a similarly aged German named Mathias. They also meet, in this international story of intrigue, a pack of Greeks. There are three of them, but, as the four main characters fail to learn their actual names, and confuse them with each other even after assigning them Mexican names (Pablo, Don Quixote, and Juan, in case you're curious), as a reader, they're simply flimsy prop-like characters, to be referred to over and over again without any more substance to a follow up appearance than their actual appearance in the first couple pages of the book.
Stephen King (not to turn this into a review of a review and go all meta on your collective bums) "found Scott Smith's refusal to look away [from the horror in the jungle] heroic." I have to say the effort required to finish this book by anyone is heroic. Oh, sure, it's the monotony, the relentless, inevitable end that plods towards you like some really, really rough beast slouching round from Bethlehem (and makes you wish you'd moved closer to Bethlehem, if only to get it over with quicker), it's that which is supposed to contribute to the horror of the book. But, for me, it doesn't. Scott Smith writes well enough. There aren't too many wasted words in describing something the tourists fall upon in the jungle, how they plan on surviving in the jungle, and what they're thinking. But, like the realization of the position the tourists have found themselves in on a hill in the jungle, surrounded by Mayans who won't let them leave, a sinking, hopeless sensation took me over as I read more and more about these characters on the hill: Scott Smith hates these characters.
Or maybe he didn't hate them. Maybe he just didn't have any respect at all for them. They are stupid, unaware of themselves or others around them. In the end, I hated the characters, as well. I felt a small tremor of dislike for myself, and for Scott Smith, for making me read this book on the beach, trying to pawn off these characters on an unsuspecting reader as if they mattered. Because if the author loses interest in his characters, for example, purely hypothetical, mind you, to focus on a plant, you're in trouble, as a reader. Again, hypothetically, a plant can only be so interesting. If it sang showtunes, recited Shakespeare, whittled life-like statues of each member of the hockey Hall of Fame, did the laundry, and made phone calls, it might be interesting. But would you tell a friend about it? Probably not. Because they'd show you their iPhone, or new car, or the Sox score, and you'd forget about the fact that you were just talking about a plant, for Pete's sake.
It was a well written enough book. It's just a shame it wasn't about something more like a story you'd be interested in reading.
SPOILER ---- Click to spoil
END SPOILER
Official Sane Magazine Book Review Rating (tm): one and a half donkeys out of nine million.
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