I’m reading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series in semi-random order. They’re pretty formulaic but quite often provide a hearty belly-laugh or two. What I didn’t expect was this novel, which from the very beginning you can tell is somewhat different: there are long paragraphs, some which go on for half a page! This was the fourth book of his that I read, and I wasn’t truly familiar with his entire range yet; but I was so used to pages and pages of one-line wise-guy dialog that it seemed like I’d strayed somehow into another author’s work with the exact same characters.
This was Parker’s 20th novel, published in 1993, and it just had more weight to it that the later ones that I’d read so far: the plot, the psychological depth, and the just-plain-old drama and pathos (in the best sense of those words). Also, I’d already started catching the literary allusions, so when I got to the end of Chapter 45 and saw this line, I just had to look it up:
Human voices wake us, and we drown.
Sure enough, it’s also the last line of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock.” Not only was it completely appropriate to the action, but it pushed the over into it’s on special category.