Although he's known primarily for his Easy Rawlins mystery
novels, bestselling author Walter Mosley has taken a
trip or two into the realm of science fiction -- not always
with the best results. THE WAVE is his latest foray.
Errol Porter is on a self-imposed road of downward
mobility. His wife has left him for another man and career-
wise, he's traded working with computers to working for Mud
Brothers, a job that has him sweeping, mopping, loading and
emptying kilns. But it's at Mud Brothers that he meets
Nella Bombury, and Errol starts to believe that life will
be good again.
Then Errol's world becomes a bit surreal when a series of
late-night phone calls begins. A man claiming to be his
father rings up in the dead of night complaining that he's
cold, naked and sleeping outside. The thing is, Errol's
father has been dead and buried for nine years. When he
mentions the phone calls to Nella, she begs him to call the
police, but Errol is neither upset nor afraid. As the calls
continue and get more personal, he becomes curious -- and a
little unnerved. One night, Errol's curiosity gets the best
of him and he sneaks into the cemetery where his father is
buried. Once inside, he's tackled by a young man who's
obviously been living outside for a while, and who claims
to be Arthur Porter, Errol's father. Rejecting that notion
completely, Errol feels the man he dubs "GT" is certainly
related to the family in some way. GT knows so much about
him and his mother and his sister that Errol reluctantly
comes to believe his father must have had another family
tucked away, and GT is a half-brother. Eventually, GT
provides Errol with information that only his father would
have known, information he'd never have passed on to
another living being, then he tells Errol where he can find
physical proof.
From this point on, Errol is forced to rethink all that
he's come to believe about the strange young man. GT's
revelations to Errol lead to him being questioned and
detained by the police, then by government agents who
believe GT and others like him are a threat to life on
earth. Errol has a hard choice to make. He can either trust
that the government scientists know what they're talking
about, that mankind truly is in danger of being
exterminated, or he can believe that GT and the others like
him have a precious gift to offer us, if only we can
conquer our fear of the unknown and reach out to embrace it.
There are some interesting ideas here, but not fresh ones.
This would be okay if the characters and storytelling were
more compelling, but everything is oddly flat. There is no
character development because Errol is really the only
character. Everyone else just revolves around him, spinning
in and out of the storyline, sometimes fairly randomly.
Mosley is a hell of a mystery writer, but his science
fiction is like a B-movie. In an X-Files sort of
way, it feeds off our general mistrust of the government to
do the right thing in a crisis situation, or to even let us
know what's going on and what they're doing about it. At
the end of THE WAVE, I was unmoved, uninterested and even a
little bored. Read it if you're between books -- it's
short.
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