Better known for his Easy Rawlins series of detective books (such as DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS), Walter Mosley returns to science fiction with THE WAVE, his best book yet in the genre. At just over 200 pages, THE WAVE follows the food pyramid style of writing: lots of sustenance and almost no fat. Unfortunately, this also makes it really hard to describe the plot without giving anything away.
Errol Porter, recently jobless, wifeless and hopeless, can’t get his dad to stop calling him. The trouble is, his father died nearly a decade ago. The calls finally lead Erroll to the cemetery, where he confronts the truth behind the communications, although the real truth is still years away. Equal parts TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE and THE X-FILES, Mosley leads readers through a world of flawed, mostly depressed people who rarely get what they want and seldom get what they need, but still manage to stay alive. As the small plot unfolds into a rather huge story, THE WAVE spans months and years without losing the strings of its plot, keeping the story rolling on through the well-realized conclusion.
The book is so lean it almost feels like the Cliff’s Notes version of some 1,000-page epic, and that’s really Mosley’s crowning achievement: Every word and character has a vital role to play. Philosophical sentiment could easily hijacked the book (as it did in an earlier Mosley SF book, BLUE LIGHT), but the thematic underpinnings of THE WAVE don’t overwhelm the story or the characters. As SF shelves are filled more and more with 1,000-page sagas consisting of half-remembered plots and complexity for complexity’s sake, THE WAVE manages to take on an epic scale with a human face, and it’s a welcome sight. –Ryun Patterson
Buy it at Amazon.
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