Justin Go

Twenty-three year old Tristan Campbell receives a letter by special courier at his California apartment from a London solicitor. It urges him to contact the lawyer at once on a matter of great urgency. After calling them, Tristan learns that he may be the beneficiary of a secret trust created by Ashley Walsingham, who died on an expedition to Mt. Everest in 1924, leaving a sizable trust (the amount not specified) to his missing lover, Imogene Soames-Andersson, or her direct descendants. If show more such beneficiary is not found within 80 years of Ashley's death, the assets are to be distributed among several charities. The lawyers believe Tristan to be that beneficiary, but he must find proof that he is the great grandson of Imogene, rather that Imogene's married sister Eleanor as the family has always believed. This sets Tristan on a search across Northern Europe for the elusive proof that must be located before the trust expires in just two months time. This is a beautifully written debut novel. The author artfully leads the reader to become more interested in what happened to Imogene than the actual distribution of the trust, as does Tristan. Thank you to Simon and Schuster for allowing me the opportunity to read this advance reader's copy. This is a story so well-told that it kept me reading way past my bedtime, and I highly recommend it when it is released in April 2014! show less

Tristan Campbell, a recent college graduate, is notified by secretive London solicitors, that he may be heir to a huge fortune. All he has to do is prove that he is the great-grandson of Ashley Walsingham, a World War I officer and mountaineer, and Imogen Soames-Andersson, a wealthy Bohemian. And he has less than two months to prove this biological connection. He sets off across Europe tracing the footsteps of the two people who may be his ancestors.

The chapters alternate between past and show more present. In the present, the reader follows Tristan in his backpacking across Europe. In the past, we have the romance between Imogen and Ashley and the latter’s experiences in World War I and in an expedition climbing Everest. There are certainly parallels between the two stories: Ashley and Tristan are both obsessed – Ashley with climbing the world’s tallest mountain and Tristan with uncovering the truth. The two also have to choose between love and what they perceive to be their duty, a choice forced on them by the women in their lives.

It is these women who arouse my ire with the author. They are anything but fully developed realistic characters. Both Imogen and Mireille, Tristan’s love interest, are vague in their motivations and selfish and manipulative. Tristan meets Mireille in France and they strike up a platonic friendship, though with some intimations of further possibilities, and she pleads with him to abandon his quest. Since their relationship is not developed into some great love affair, her pleas come across as those of an overwrought harpy. Imogen’s behaviour is also unconvincing; one can understand her fear that Ashley will be killed in the war, but when he survives, her treatment of him seems just bizarre.

Another issue with the novel is that there are just too many improbabilities. Just as Tristan reaches a dead end, he encounters someone who, despite the locale, speaks perfect English and is able to provide another vital clue. These chance meetings even allow him to find documents. Tristan acknowledges the unlikelihood of his finds: “Surely it is beyond all notions of luck to have found those letters.” Later, he adds, “It was impossible. It required the gathering of whole constellations, a harvest of countless stars funneled into a single cup and rolled out, a pair of sixes, a million times in perfect succession.” But we are to believe that “If it seemed improbable, maybe that was only [our] own narrowness of vision”?!

And then there’s the ending or lack thereof. The author gives so much detail about unimportant events, but then abandons the book. His cutting away from the locked room in remotest Iceland is inexcusable.
I can certainly guess as to what happened, but to take a reader on a long and detailed search only to leave him/her adrift at the end reeks of manipulation.

This book tries to be a love story, a mystery, and an adventure quest. Unfortunately, it is not successful as any of these. The romances do not come across as believable. The secrecy around the mysterious will is also questionable. And the pace for an adventure quest is just too slow.

I regret the steady running of the hours wasted on reading this novel. show less

Beautiful prose, and a fascinating dedication to detailed narrative when the points rather lay outside it. Something about the attempt doesn't quite work for me, and I can't love it - but I don't dislike it either, and I look forward with interest to the author's next book.

Part adventure/thriller, part romance, and part "modern literature," *The Steady Running of the Hour* pulled me in early. Tristan Campbell learns that he has eight weeks to prove that he is the direct descendant of Ashley Walsingham, a British mountaineer who perished on Mount Everest in 1924. Such proof will result in a tremendous inheritance (which transfers to various charitable organizations at the end of said eight weeks). Tristan's persistent and wild pursuit of unlikely clues and show more crazy hunches lead him around Europe where he begins to unravel the story of Ashley and his brief, passionate love affair with Imogen Soames-Andersson, which may have resulted in a secret "illegitimate" child, possibly Tristan's great grandmother (or grandmother... whatever). I enjoyed the adventure aspect of this novel; Mr. Go's writing is good enough that I was willing, even eager to suspend disbelief and go along for an enjoyable ride. But Justin Go tries to do too much. When the improbable clues begin to serve as towering (and overdone) metaphors and the narrative descends into speculation on "the trivial and the tragic" nature of any but fated love, I grew impatient. The ending was simply inane. My unsought advice to Justin Go is to stick with writing adventure stories and leave the metaphors, allusions, and philosophical musings to writers with a more subtle hand. show less