Review of Jude O'Reilly's Heartbreaker: No One's an Angel

I just finished Jude O'Reilly's Heartbreaker, about a desperate mother's hunt for a serial killer who wiped out her whole family and left her to blame, literally.  I really enjoyed this novel, chocked full of stunners, replete with a multi-twist ending with shocker after shocker.

Now, readers of this blog through the years since 2006 will know my high regard for Dexter and its spinoffs, about a serial killer intent on eliminating serial killers and others out to destroy more or less good people.  O'Reilly's serial killer would be an ideal target of Dexter, he or she -- they, in today's parlance -- has nothing good about them.

O'Reilly has a keen understanding of human nature, including academe, a field I know all too well.  "Some of my colleagues are more interested in their own research. But for me, it’s the light that goes on in their eyes when a young person realizes a profound truth for the first time,” a professor tells the mother hunting the serial killer.  And O'Reilly's way with words infuses other elements of the story that somehow manages to be sassy, sexy, sage, and frightening throughout.  

Harvesting organs has played a role in fiction at least since Robin Cook's Coma in 1977, made into a movie the following year by Michael Crichton. Heartbreaker -- which applies more than figuratively to its story -- takes this to a whole new level.  Daphne, the desperate mother, is a defense attorney, and her interactions with police and lawyers provide a simmering blend of law, medicine, and often life-and-death ethical dilemmas that you'll likely ponder long after you finish the novel.

O'Reilly is British, and among the new words and phrases her novel taught me are "swallow hands","kohl eyes","plinth", and "blagging".  They'll be no blagging of your time if you read Heartbreaker, and I highly recommend it if your heart and soul are in need of a rollercoaster ride.

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Westworld 1.5: The Voice Inside Dolores

An altogether excellent Westworld 1.5, with real progress in our understanding of what's going, mostly from Dolores, and a little from the Man in Black.  In both cases, conversations with Ford elicit some of the best moments.

I should mention that the conversations with Ford are much better than the conversations with Bernard, which are pretty good, too.  But that's as it should be, since Ford is one of the two creators of Westworld - along with the ineffable Arnold - whereas Bernard is just the head programmer and a sensitive builder of individual models.

But this means that Dolores will say things to Ford that she wouldn't say to Bernard, and Ford knows how to elicit at least part of that.  The other part comes, of course, from Delores herself, and we see this tonight point blank when she lies to Ford about her continuing relationship with the voice inside her - presumably Arnold's - a voice that also tells her destiny is to leave Westworld, presumably with William, which is what she convincingly tells him.

Let's stop for a minute at "convincingly". William's convinced - no surprise, Dolores is fulfilling a very deep need of his - but so are we, the audience.  And here Westworld is ineluctably partaking of a paradox, or at least an insoluble puzzle, that afflict or animates or maybe just affects every story on screen about human-like androids.

The androids are all played by humans.  And this means that, no matter how well they act - I mean as actors and actresses on the screen, playing androids - their humanity, the humanness of the actor, will shine through.  So when we see Dolores behaving so humanly, part of that stems from the actress being human.  It was the same dynamic which made some of the androids in Bladerunner, for example, so appealing.

But back into the narrative - not the narratives that Ford has created, but the narrative of the series Westworld itself, based on the movie by Michael Crichton - an important question is: how much does Ford know or suspect that Delores is lying?

Ford, like the androids becoming human, knows a lot more than he tells us (and certainly more than he tells the hosts and guests he talks to).   He presumably does not have a bicameral mind - the source of the voice inside Dolores - but he has a lot more in common with his evolving creations than even he realizes, though who knows how much he realizes, which was the point of my question in the first place.

His conversation with the Man in Black is tantalizing, once again leaving us just a little short of knowing if the Man in Black is a special guest or a special host, though he moved a tiny bit more in the direction of being a guest, i.e., human.   Teddy stops him from stabbing Ford with a knife.  That knife presumably would have hurt Ford, even killed him, but only if the Man in Black was human himself, right?

Come to think of it, it's not quite clear what kind of real damage, if any, guests can do to guests in Westworld.  Well, that's as good a place as any to conclude this little disquisition. Each week grinds our lens of vision a little more clear, and I'm looking forward to more.


See also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black? ... Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold ... Westworld 1.4: Vacation, Connie Francis, and Kurt Vonnegut


 

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