O'Hara's Choice [Paperback]

I loved his novels Trinity, Redemption and QBVII. They were great stories spun in the tradition of historical novels. His story-telling ability and character creation communicate the humanity of the age and culture about which he writes.

O'Hara's Choice is no exception. Patriotic Duty and family loyalty duel in this tale set in the Gilded Age that followed the U. S. Civil War. Leon Uris was a great writer. He had the ability to create characters who communicate the age and times in which Uris set his novels.

The worst part of coming to the end of this book is the nagging awareness that this is the last Uris novel the reader will read.

Uris does have a fine command of the language and has produced 394 pages without allowing trite, overused phraseology to weaken either description or dialogue. At rare times, the writing does flow at a rapid clip, carrying the reader along almost effortlessly, and I offer the description of the battle of Bull Run (to become known as the first battle of Manassas) as a welcome example of this. The early sexual tension between Zach and Amanda is also handled adroitly although elsewhere it sometimes mimics the "bodice ripper" genre. The inter-service jealousy and derision between the Navy and the Marine Corps is realistically portrayed but becomes tedious and repetitious after a while. Horace Kerr's internal dichotomy between his progressive thoughts toward the recently-freed Negroes and his culturally learned biases against non-white races comes to the fore several times, but some of his explosions are not well supported by earlier thoughts and actions and appear artificial and contrived. So much for the strong points.

Uris' introduction of the various characters strikes me as poorly accomplished. It is as though one is watching a disconnected slide show (or, for our younger readers who may never have seen a slide show, let's call it a PowerPoint presentation). Characters pop up rather unexpectedly, and the reader has a poor idea of what their relationship may be to the other characters until much further along in the reading. Fortunately, Uris begins each chapter with the date and location of the action. These "stage directions" do help keep us somewhat oriented as to where and when we are, but we must be careful top pay attention to them or risk significant confusion.

Several "red herrings" crop up here and there with no particular contribution to the story line. For instance, Horace Kerr, Amanda's rich industrialist father, is set up to lose his life in a storm at sea but survives with a few bumps and bruises. Later he is equally foreshadowed to suffer a debilitating if not fatal stroke, but that coup de grace never comes after all.

Then there is Emily, Amanda's older sister, who is mentally unbalanced and is generally stored away out of sight in the unfrequented north wing of the mansion. I suppose she functions fairly well as one of several skeletons in the Kerr family closet, a fact that is strongly underscored once the reader finally learns the horrible secret that explains her insanity. Still, she never plays even a strong supporting role in the Amanda - Zach relationship, which is the unifying thread throughout the book, and the reader is left to wonder whether her character might have been more fully developed--or omitted.

Is there even an identifiable theme in this novel? Basically we find two young lovers, one torn between her duty to carry on the family fortune and power and her desire to marry her Marine lover; the other torn between his love (or lust) for Amanda and his "marriage" to the Marine Corps. The latter problem is exacerbated by a dreadful secret that Zach carries with him concerning his Marine-hero father. None of these conflicts ever finds satisfactory resolution. There is no denouement. The lovers are conflicted to begin with and are equally conflicted when the novel ends. Their situation, while at times compared with that of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, never reaches the tragic level of those more famous lovers, whose position as the symbols of unachievable love remains unassailed by Uris' novel.

You've been warned.