From Amazon.com
"When I first saw my temporary secretary it never occurred to me to flirt with him." The bemused confidence and upended assumption of this first sentence from
The High Flyer, by Susan Howatch, reveal a great deal about the character who speaks it and the shape of this novel as a whole. The narrator, Carter Graham, is a successful London lawyer, a "high flyer" whose thoroughly secular plan for a perfect life (clothes, car, kids, etc.) is proceeding quite punctually, thanks to her strong sense of entitlement and her talent for social manipulation. The events that follow, however, undermine Carter's confident assumptions regarding the inner lives of the people around her. Carter meets and marries another high flyer, a charming business titan named Kim. Slowly, Carter learns of Kim's involvement in the occult, his Nazi past, and the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of his former wife. As the mysteries of Kim's past are revealed to Carter, Kim's personality undergoes a deep and demonic transformation. Carter, terrified, seeks shelter at a Christian healing center, where a cast of clerics and lay people help Carter reconstruct a life for herself, and a theological and psychological framework that makes some sense of the blindness and betrayal that destroyed her life with Kim. "[C]reation's not about efficiency," explains one character, "it's about love. It's about shedding blood, sweat and tears to make the thing you care about come right. It's about enduring the shadow side of creation and using it so that in the end everything can be brought into the light." The novel's greatest strength is its suspenseful plotting, which calls to mind (thanks in part to the narrator's frequent allusions to) the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
--Michael Joseph Gross
From Publishers Weekly
Devoted readers of Howatch's Starbridge series (Glamorous Powers; Glittering Images; Absolute Truths) will be delighted to encounter recurring characters Nicholas Darrow and Lewis Hall in her new psychological-spiritual thriller. Darrow and Hall call upon their ecclesiastical, paranormal and New Age therapeutic expertise in healing damaged souls when success-driven London lawyer Carter Graham is suddenly confronted with phenomena that test the coping abilities of her liberated, modern mind. The quintessential "high flyer," Carter has broken through the glass ceiling and become a partner in the prestigious law firm of Curtis, Towers. Recently married to Kim Betz, a handsome banker almost 15 years her senior, Carter lives in the "right" apartment complex, drives a Porsche and is thinking of having a baby. However, Kim's hidden past (involvement with Nazis, the occult, group sex and an unsavory psychic healer named Mrs. Mayfield) threatens Carter's carefully orchestrated life plan. The mysterious death of Kim's ex-wife and the vision of her ghost send Carter to the edge of sanity and force her to confront demons from her past that she has successfully avoided until now. Two-thirds into the book, the pace of the narrative slows down so the spiritual experts can expound their modern dogma, but it soon hurtles the reader toward a tepid conclusion. In spite of these lulls, the work is entertaining and intellectually stimulating, providing copious amounts of information supporting links between ESP, psychology and modern religious thought. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
