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(More customer reviews)Nicholas Evans, best known for his bestselling "The Horse Whisperer," has a gift of creating believable characters and developing them over the course of a novel. He gives his prose and settings a masculine feel, while keeping the themes more feminine-friendly, focused on family and love and jilted relationships. It's a formula that's worked, though it was beginning to feel like, well . . . a formula.
In this latest effort, Evans varies his themes and structure, giving us his most ambitious work yet. It's aptly titled, since his approach is brave in its attempt to go into new territory on new trails. We start off with young Tommy as he deals with childhood, bed-wetting, and bullying at an English boarding school. I was thankful for this different direction, and found myself caught up in young Tommy's struggles. The prologue, though, clued me in to drama and violence to come. Sure enough, the story takes some turns within a few chapters, and less than a hundred pages in throws readers for a good twist. It works. But it also feels a bit pedantic, the way Evans spends pages going back to explain how it came to be.
Tommy ends up in Hollywood with his mother and step-father, part of the movie industry scene. He remains relatively unblemished by an era that is known to have been saturated in sexual and narcotic misadventures, but his mother is not so fortunate. The step-father becomes increasingly abusive, and his mother is pushed to make some fateful decisions (yes, this is where the typical Evans comes in). It's really no surprise when she ends up in the arms of, you guessed it, a man in Montana who has a gift with horses. Yawn.
More frustrating than this Evans cliche is his decision to alternate chapters between not only characters but time frames, with very little to reorient us each time the switch is made. We jump from Tommy's young life to his divorced adult life to his mother's teenage years to his own son's fate. Danny (the son) is facing a possible court-martial for his part in civilian deaths while working in the US military. This subplot was intriguing, but felt tacked on in the midst of the nostalgic and self-discovery bits. On a side note, I wish Evans' editors would fix a few British tendencies in the Americanized versions so that we don't have Americans such as Danny saying things that sound patently British.
All in all, Evans gives us interesting characters and settings, but I hope his next book will find a happy medium between the cliches and formulas and the disjointed structure of "The Brave."
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