Charles Lambert (1)

As many of the reviews already state; this is an odd little book. It aims high, but ultimately leaves too much up to the reader to infer, deduce and outright decide. While I don’t mind some of that in a novel, leaving it all up to the reader is just plain laziness or incompetence. There is a great story in there, but the author seems to have given up on it.

Morgan, acid scarred son of wealth, lives alone in a mansion. He spends his days cataloging the maps and books collected by his wandering grandfather. Morgan has had a troubled life; a mother ill both physically and mentally and an isolated childhood have left him ill-equipped to deal with the outside world he has never seen.

Then children start to arrive at the estate. The youngest are infants; the oldest is five year old David. Where they come from and how they get there is a mystery. They show more just are. They are preternaturally well behaved, quiet, and smarter than normal for their ages. David is their leader; he talks and acts like a small adult. They provide needed company for Morgan. They simply accept his scarred face as he accepts them. When one of the children becomes ill, the housekeeper calls in a medical man, Dr. Crane, who accepts both Morgan and the children just as they are. He completes their family odd little family.

The children obviously have a purpose, but Morgan cannot figure out what it is. They learn from his books and instruction. They disappear into the many rooms of the house for hours, sometimes finding truly odd and rather macabre items.

Outside the estate, a dystopian world lies. When it intrudes in the form of officials who say he cannot be harboring children, Morgan must face the outside world- and his family’s place in it- for the first time. What he finds is grim and bizarre.

I’m not sure what to call this novel. It’s like a dystopian fairy tale, a fable written by Kafka. After a ways into the story, I would not have been surprised if Morgan had turned into a giant cockroach. The story is uneven; the first part is very good but as it heads into the ending it changes tone completely, and, frankly, I am left thinking “WTH was that about?!?!” If I could, I’d give the first part of the book a 4-star rating and the ending a 2-star rating. show less

Morgan lives alone but for a small staff in the large house where he grew up. One day a child appears, and he and the housekeeper, Engel, take her in. More children appear and they take them all in, though it's unclear where the children are coming from or why they have arrived. The world outside the wall around the estate is dangerous, but less so than it used to be; eventually, Morgan and his friend Doctor Crane and a few of the children venture out, to visit the factory that Morgan's show more sister Rebecca runs. The factory produces power, but Morgan does not know what kind or by what means. The answers are otherworldly and horrifying; their visit becomes a battle, after which they return home, victorious but shocked. The children, their task complete, melt away, and Morgan and the Doctor are left to ponder the events and their purpose. Crane's theory - that the children came out of thin air to accomplish a task even they didn't know the precise nature of, much like in children's books where people travel from one world or time to another - is more of a resolution than most horror novels have.

As horror novels go, this is a gentle one. Morgan's house reminded me a bit of the house in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and there were some eerie discoveries in the house, including human models made of wax. The story behind Morgan's disfigurement is dark (but not supernatural), revealed to Doctor Crane all at once. The explanation for the children's identity - David finds their story in an old magazine, a story about a Children's Home and the children that were taken away and gassed or shot - and Doctor Crane's theory dovetail together to make a satisfying conclusion.

Quotes

He would never forgive them for assuming that he would wish to live, for assuming that all life, of any kind, was to be preferred to death. (28)

[Morgan would wonder] what the world that had formed itself around him might want from him. Because that was where its meaning, and by extension his, would finally lie; in the demands it made on him. (96-97)

He understood himself as power. The body is a weapon, he thought, in the right hands. (112)

Where are [the children] from? he thought, for the thousandth time. Who are they? What do they want from me? (130)

"Where are you from?" said Morgan.
"I'm from where we were taken," said David. "We all are." (138)

Everything became inevitable with time. (140)

You can't grow into a a face that was never yours, he thought. He thought of his own face as the mask and the mask as the true face that lay beneath it. (159)

"What's happened to you is you, you can't change that....Sometimes you have to give up the easy thing and do the right one." (David to Morgan, 201-202) show less

Christopher Moore should write a gay James Bond. Or maybe I should. Film rights would be snapped up in a jiffy. Stick around, kids, I’m tossing out million-dollar ideas like condoms at a Pride Parade. Charles Lambert’s new novel Any Human Face is being called in the U.K. press a thriller “set on the seamier fringe of Rome’s gay scene.” However, if you come to Any Human Face expecting The Bourne Gay-Identity, you’ll be disappointed. If you come looking for weighty, believable show more human drama set within multi-layered political intrigue, then you’ve turned the right page.

I think that the Guardian’s description of the setting as “the seamier fringe of Rome’s gay scene” is a bit o’ backhanded homophobia. Yes, there is a character who shoots some “pornographic” photography and probably video, too, but he’s rather a Mother Hen type who takes care of any stray (gay or bird) off the street. He’s more on the noble side than the seamy side, and the main relationships in the story are quite sensitive, not sleazy. All the sleaze (murders) are political and unrelated to sexual identity. Yes, there are some graphic sexual moments but only to reflect what occurs in real relationships. I mean, like…you’ve done it, right, squire?

I would describe this novel rather as a thoughtful character study of a quirky gay bookstore owner and sometime art/antiquity dealer named Andrew in Rome who stumbles into a political vipers nest involving high-level politicians and Vatican officials doing very bad things. At its core, the story is about Andrew’s struggle to overcome heartbreak from his past and learn to love again. This book being a literary work and not a hack best-seller, Lambert manages to integrate some thoughtful commentary on writing, art, and photography as well by having the main character try to set up an art show in his bookstore. Lambert creates an interesting juxtaposition between theory/critique and reality through this art show. The co-curator of the show expresses a complex gibberish of analysis to explain how the photographs in the exhibit are “Art.” When the reality is that one of the photographs reveals an actual crime being committed; it’s a performative photograph, if you will, that is FUCKING EVIDENCE OF A (crime i will not identify so as not to spoil it but you can probably guess). So…ehem..fuck your critique. Of course, Lambert isn’t anti-intellectual, but he certainly shows how literary and art theory can tie itself up in a knot of incestuous bullcrap.

Just as in his short stories, Lambert doesn’t grandstand as a writer, rather he creates a compelling reality and allows the characters to express themselves naturally. I found Andrew to be absolutely convincing as a real human being. Although the book is not as fast paced as you might expect a thriller to be, when Andrew was in actual physical danger in the story, my heart was racing, and I couldn’t put the book down.

Any Human Face has quite a few interesting characters, including the Mother Hen character I mentioned before who dresses like a “tribal queen or brothel keeper” in swathes of flowery curtain-pajamas. And the bitchiest rich hag of an art-gallery maven you’ll ever come across. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel as a taste of Rome and the inner life and struggles of Andrew to make a life for himself despite his fears of aging, of failing, and more than anything else, of being lonely. show less