Leper [Hardcover]

This might be Steve Thayer's best historical suspense novel. Readers watch as protagonist John Severson evolves from military officer to schoolteacher to leper. The startling diagnosis and label ruin his promising life in Minnesota, and he lives the next sixty years in secluded colonies in Louisiana and Hawaii. This is the most epic and original of Thayer's work. Much about leprosy is misunderstood and this book attempts to educate as well as entertain. Fans of the author will delight in cameos by characters in his previous bestselling novels.

Few novels have been written from the perspective of a leper, so this historical novel spanning from World War I to the 1990s promised to be an interesting read. Indeed, The Leper starts off with a bang, with a bedraggled group of lost Marines stumbling upon a mysterious leper colony hidden deep in a remote forest in Europe.

Time quickly passes. Our hero, a tall and handsome young Swedish-American, returns from the war and becomes a high school math teacher in Minnesota before contracting leprosy from his wartime exposure. He is captured (and I'm not spoiling the plot here, as all this becomes apparent early on) and sent first to a hellish leprosy camp in Louisiana and, ultimately, to the larger colony on Molokai (Hawaii). Along the way, he falls in love, and makes friends and enemies.

So far, so good. The problem with The Leper is not with the plot outline, but with the execution. The characters are so wooden that it is hard to suspend disbelief. Even the larger-than-life hero never comes fully to life. Instead, we are treated to a parade of one-dimensional, cardboard characters, entering and exiting the hero's orb. The female love interests are especially stereotyped - the alluring student, the vixen Negro prostitute, the hula-dancing native Hawaiian. Most unbelievable of all are a series of phantom-like characters from the past whose sole purposes in life revolve around "the Swede."

Contributing to the difficulty in escaping into this novel is the poor quality of the narrative. Mr. Thayer started with a promising outline, along with quite a bit of historical information (much of it gleaned from The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai, which I recommend as a nonfiction account). But, rather than integrate it all into a nuanced narrative, he merely talks at us for 400-odd pages.

Most jarring of all is the clichéd and error-filled writing itself. Breaking Stephen King's cardinal rule on the use of adverbs (see King's On Writing), the pages are strewn with excess adverbs, including the dread "literally" (as in, "he was literally covered with raw ulcers)." Almost every misspelling that a computer spell-checker will miss (e.g., ores-oars, lightening-lightning, breath-breathe, whose-who's, there-their) can be found in abundance, indicating a lack of competent human editing by North Star Press.

In the end, much as I started off wanting to love this book, the flaws are severe enough that I can only give it a half-hearted nod. If you know little about leprosy and want to learn more without reading nonfiction, and if you are not too picky about clean writing, you might enjoy it.

I was surprised to see all the positive reviews for this book. I have enjoyed Thayer's other books, found them very suspenseful. This one seemed to me like he might have written it first, and improved with the others. Also, I can't remember reading a book with so many proofreading errors, looked like he recorded it and had it typed by someone who couldn't spell: fair for fare, road for rode, mote for moat, passed for past, wrapped for rapped, your for you're - you get the idea. His other books are far superior.

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