Afterburn FROM OUR EDITORS
Our Review
Be Forewarned
Colin Harrison's fourth novel, Afterburn, recounts the violent convergence of three desperate, very damaged people, all of whom are searching for the missing element -- love, personal safety, an end to guilt, a sense of genetic continuity -- whose absence dominates their lives. It is a powerful -- and powerfully written -- thriller, but it is also a dark, graphic, and occasionally desolate one. Readers in search of a light, suspenseful diversion should consider themselves warned and look for something else.
Afterburn opens with an extended prologue set in Southeast Asia in 1972. With great narrative immediacy, Harrison shows us the dark heart of the American experience in Vietnam by zeroing in on a single character: Charlie Ravich, an American pilot who has flown nearly 100 bombing missions over enemy territory. On his final mission, Charlie is shot down and captured by North Vietnamese troops. For an unspecified period that has the timeless quality of a nightmare, Charlie is imprisoned, questioned, and tortured, before being accidentally rescued and very nearly killed by a roving company of marines. These early scenes of extreme cruelty set the tone for much of the rest of the book.
The second section moves the action forward to the fall of 1999. Charlie Ravich, scarred and battered but still a survivor, is once again in the Far East, this time in Hong Kong. Charlie is now the founder and CEO of a telecommunications development company called Technetrix and has come to China to negotiate a loan that will enable him to build a state-of-the-art factory on Chinese soil. By bizarre coincidence, Charlie finds himself first on the scene when billionaire industrialist Henry Lai suffers a fatal heart attack. Within minutes of Lai's death, Charlie parlays his insider's knowledge of that death into a stock market transaction that nets him an instant $16 million profit. Here, and everywhere else in Afterburn, blood and money are inextricably connected.
Windfall profits aside, the Charlie Ravich of these later years has fallen on hard times. On a professional level, he is engaged in a constant struggle to keep his company alive and viable in a fiercely competitive market. On a personal level, he has suffered an irreversible series of losses. His wife, Ellie, is behaving erratically and appears to be entering the early stages of Alzheimer's. His son, Ben, is dead, killed by leukemia at the age of 19. His daughter, Julia, is incapable of bearing children. Unable to face the prospect of his bloodline dying out, Charlie decides that, one way or another, he will father a new child, and he initiates a clandestine search for a suitable surrogate mother.
Charlie's story is one of three primary narratives that alternate and, eventually, intersect. One of these concerns Christina Welles, a 27-year-old Columbia dropout with a head for numbers and a complicated past. As the novel opens, she is serving a seven-year sentence for her part in a series of truck thefts performed under the auspices of local Mob boss Tony Verducci. When her sentence is suddenly commuted after four years, she goes underground in New York City, believing, with good reason, that the vengeful, unpredictable Verducci has unpleasant plans for her.
The third major protagonist is Rick Bocca, a former bodybuilder who was once Christina's lover, as well as her partner in the truck theft ring. Rick has spent four years brooding over Christina's incarceration, believing that she received the punishment that should have been reserved for him. Before the novel is over, he will receive more than his fair share of extreme, and belated, punishment.
The driving force behind the plot is Tony Verducci's conviction that Rick will lead him to Christina, who will lead him, in turn, to a cache of money he believes was stolen from him years before. When Charlie Ravich meets Christina in a New York City bar, he enters into a brief, unplanned relationship with her, then finds himself trapped in someone else's nightmare, victimized by forces he can neither understand nor control. By the end of the novel, all of the players have come together in a single room, a modern-day torture chamber in which the rules of the civilized world are suspended, in which everything -- without exception -- is permitted.
In the end, Afterburn is a novel about many things: fate, guilt, grief, greed, and the blind human struggle to survive under the most appalling conditions and to establish some connection with the bleak, uncertain future. It is also, at bottom, a novel about cruelty: the unconscious cruelty of the universe and the deliberate, studied cruelty of men who will do anything in the name of money. With a directness and a clarity of expression that is reminiscent -- and worthy -- of Robert Stone, Colin Harrison stares into the abyss of human misery and does not flinch. In Afterburn he has created a grim, graphic, darkly memorable thriller that is difficult to put down and even more difficult to forget.
--Bill Sheehan
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Colin Harrison's riveting new thriller tells the story of Charlie Ravich, a survivor whose brutal experience as a POW in Vietnam has more than prepared him for the cutthroat world of global commerce. Now an Upper East Side executive in his late fifties, Charlie has only one problem: his family is dying out. His wife teeters on the edge of Alzheimer's; their son has succumbed to leukemia; and their daughter, Julia, is unable to bear a child. Charlie is being trumped by time.
Enter Christina, a voluptuous and beguiling Columbia University dropout - intelligent, selectively dishonest, filled with desire. Her affair with Rick Bocca, a member of a big-time truck-theft ring run by mobster Tony V., has landed her in prison. After four years at Bedford Hills, she is suddenly released by the Manhattan D.A.'s office - perhaps because she is innocent, perhaps not.
Warned by a detective that Christina is being set up by Tony V., Rick begins a desperate, bungled search to warn Christina, who has lied her way into the high-flying world of Charlie Ravich. But her past catches up with her, and Rick's catches up with him, setting off a harrowing chain of betrayals that leaves only one person with any hope of a future.
A high-voltage thriller at once smart, sexy, and graphically violent, Afterburn spans the mean streets of New York's underworld and Hong Kong's corridors of high finance, and stands as Harrison's most unforgettable work yet.
About the Author:
Colin Harrison is the deputy editor of Harper's Magazine and the author of three previous novels: Break and Enter, Bodies Electric, and Manhattan Nocturne. He is a graduate of Haverford College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He and his wife, writer Kathryn Harrison, live in Brooklyn.
SYNOPSIS
Colin Harrison's riveting new thriller tells the story of Charlie Ravich, a survivor whose brutal experience as a POW in Vietnam has more than prepared him for the cutthroat world of global commerce. Now an Upper East Side executive in his late fifties, Charlie has only one problem: his family is dying out. His wife teeters on the edge of Alzheimer's; their son has succumbed to leukemia; and their daughter, Julia, is unable to bear a child. Charlie is being trumped by time.
Enter Christina, a voluptuous and beguiling Columbia University dropout - intelligent, selectively dishonest, filled with desire. Her affair with Rick Bocca, a member of a big-time truck-theft ring run by mobster Tony V., has landed her in prison. After four years at Bedford Hills, she is suddenly released by the Manhattan D.A.'s office - perhaps because she is innocent, perhaps not.
Warned by a detective that Christina is being set up by Tony V., Rick begins a desperate, bungled search to warn Christina, who has lied her way into the high-flying world of Charlie Ravich. But her past catches up with her, and Rick's catches up with him, setting off a harrowing chain of betrayals that leaves only one person with any hope of a future.
A high-voltage thriller at once smart, sexy, and graphically violent, Afterburn spans the mean streets of New York's underworld and Hong Kong's corridors of high finance, and stands as Harrison's most unforgettable work yet.
FROM THE CRITICS
USA Today
A dark tale...A complicated, smart story.
Scott Tobias - The Onion's A.V. Club
Though the term rarely applies, Colin Harrison's Afterburn is a literary thriller in the best sense of both words, a deceptively intricate study of man's basest instincts told in ferocious, compulsively readable language. With his characters constantly hanging on the precipice between life and death, Harrison frees himself to cut to the gristle of human experience, forging a story from blood, sex, torture, and vanity. But beneath all the shows of hyper-masculinity--even the women here are masculine--the book conveys an undercurrent of sorrow, as three protagonists come to terms with their past transgressions. Principal among them is 58-year-old Charlie Ravich, Harrison's man in full, a Vietnam veteran and electronics tycoon whose killer instinct segues from a jungle hooch in 1972 to a formal banquet in 1999 Hong Kong. In one early scene, he watches a gambling mogul choke to death, uses this inside information to short-sell the man's stock, and walks away with $8 million in profit before the markets close. But his life back home in Manhattan is deeply troubled: With his son recently succumbing to leukemia, his wife in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and his daughter unable to conceive a child, Ravich takes out an ad for a surrogate mother to keep his genetic stamp alive. Enter Christina Welles, a fiercely intelligent 27-year-old released from prison under mysterious circumstances, especially considering that she was really guilty of involvement in a mob-backed truck-theft scheme. Her tough but slow-witted ex-husband scours the city determined to protect her from gangsters who need her phenomenal skill with numbers to pull off their elaborate heists. Like any good thriller, Afterburn effortlessly tangles their stories into a tight knot, but Harrison has more on his mind than a handful of (admittedly nasty) twists. Ravich's quest to have a child, for example, seems to be driven by appalling hubris when he proposes to support it through the age of 21 without ever laying eyes on it. But his genetic contribution becomes a poignant response to the death and decay within his family and within himself. Afterburn opens with an epigram from Sartre about how torture is not the route to people's real secrets, then proves in virtuoso style that they can only access them when brushing against their own mortality.
Peter Kurth - Salon
If you like your novels mean, tough, ugly and male, you're going to love Afterburn, Colin Harrison's latest exercise in New York noir. Harrison is deputy editor at Harper's magazine, a creamy stylist and crack storyteller whose previous books, Break and Enter, Bodies Electric and Manhattan Nocturne, established him as a master of the "literary" thriller. I put the word in quotation marks because -- let's be serious -- Tolstoy he ain't.
"The drill went into the outside of his left ankle," Harrison writes, "just above the boot. It was worse this time, the bit grinding into the joint capsule until it punctured through the tendons on the other side, then continuing through the flesh until the spinning tip spurted through the inside of his ankle. 'Oh, God, please,' Rick cried, gripping the table and squeezing his eyes. 'Oh! Fuck, fuck!'"
Speaking of that: "He'd routinely fucked her for ninety minutes straight, like running ten miles, the sweat pouring off his face and chest, riveting down his arms, soaking the bed.And she could take it, she could take anything he did, any position, any degree of force. If you remembered that, it kept getting more mysterious." Harrison writes about sex with a ponderousness that might be expected from the husband of Kathryn Harrison, author of the incest memoir The Kiss: "The idea that he had fucked her into unconsciousness was so exciting that he just blasted himself away into her."
Well, all right -- this is what you want in escapist fiction. Afterburn tells the story of three lost souls whose lives entwine in a web of crime against a backdrop of millennial hedonism, money-grubbing soullessness and cruelty. Charlie Ravich is an aging New York electronics executive, a former Air Force pilot and Vietnam POW haunted by guilt for his role in the war and desperate to continue his genetic line after the death of his son from leukemia. Christina Welles is a cool, brainy Columbia dropout and small-time grifter, haunted by a childhood rape, "insatiable" lust and what she worries is her "hard heart." And Rick Bocca is Christina's iron-pumping former boyfriend and partner in crime, haunted by the fact that Christina took the rap for him after a failed truck hijacking and now has the mob on her heels. Everyone in Afterburn is haunted by something -- Harrison's New York is a barren, hopeless place. He seems to be making a moral point, but damned if you can tell what it is amid all those power dicks and severed limbs.
"When I die," Christina reflects, "my space will be filled right away, others will sit in the subway seat, wear the shoes I would have worn, bite the apple I would have bitten. Like I was never there." Charlie, too, is obsessed with his pending oblivion: "One more child, God.Give me one more child. Correct the flow of time, God. Let me roll the dice again." And Rick -- no Einstein, as the saying goes -- ponders the nature of truth and lies and comes up with "a web of maybes. Most of them too complicated. He'd learned that if a plan had too many twists and turns it usually broke down."
It's a measure of Harrison's skill as a writer that Afterburn doesn't break down, despite the popcorn philosophy and endless orgasms of its characters. Harrison is an old-fashioned novelist with a gift for sharp characterization and a sense of pace that keeps you reading even when you know it's all hokum. Just skip the ruminations and go for the thrills. As Harrison writes, "Every girl has a story.but you can ride only one at a time."
Publishers Weekly
Writing like an angel, Harrison in his new thriller (after Manhattan Nocturne) casts human existence as demonic, in a scenario as fierce as any imagined by Goya. The horror begins as American pilot Charlie Ravich is taken prisoner in 1972 in Vietnam, to be rescued by GIs who maim him in the process. Jumping to the present, the narrative focuses on another prisoner, Christina Welles, suffering behind bars in upstate New York for her role in a mob-directed theft ring. Charlie, too, is in pain; though now a wealthy electronics mogul, he's under attack both professionally, by larcenous contractors and a rival firm (like Harrison's Bodies Electric, this is a finance thriller as well as a crime novel), and personally--his wife is exhibiting signs of Alzheimer's, and he mourns the death of his only son. Then there's Rick Bocca, Christina's lover, inadvertently responsible for her imprisonment; he's hiding from the mob on Long Island, good as dead. When the mob, looking for $5 million that Christina stole from them in her final heist, engineers her release in hopes of snatching her to retrieve their loot, Harrison sets in motion a daringly complex tale of chase-and-hunt, of villainy, sacrifice and redemption, that unites these three main figures, and the gangsters who will go to any length--including monstrous torture, detailed by Harrison to the point of sensationalism--to get their money. As smartly orchestrated as the action is, it's Harrison's achingly real characters who empower the novel, as well as his prose: is there a noir novelist alive who can match his wattage? That's not always a virtue, though, as Harrison too often lets rip passages that, though rhapsodic or acutely observant, retard narrative flow. If not always expertly paced, however, the novel astonishes throughout, as much for its moral force as for its storytelling dazzle. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
His son dead, his daughter infertile, and his wife wiped away by Alzheimer's, rich executive Charlie is losing his family; but there's even more to lose when he encounters Christina, who's managed to do time both at Columbia and in prison. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Peter Blauner, Author of The Intruder and Man of the Hour
Colin Harrison is a writer of uncommon grace and velocity. His stories have a rare combination of moral weight, suspensefulness, and dangerous glamour. Afterburn may be his best book yet. Don't miss it. — Peter Blauner
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