Review
The strength, the backbone, of
A Vengeful Longing
lies in the character of investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich. Snatched
from the pages of Dostoevsky's novel
Crime and Punishment, where he is
pencil-sketched as the nemesis of murderer Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov,
Petrovich comes brilliantly alive in Morris's hands. Admittedly Dostoevsky did
hint at Petrovich's Zen-like qualities while he patiently waited for Raskolnikov
to catch up and catch on to the fact that the magistrate had known of his guilt
almost from the beginning.
But Morris shows us that Petrovich is not just a smart man, he is a wise and
serene man who enjoys the game and who knows how to make his adversaries turn
their own weaknesses against themselves. This is never-so-evident as when he is
trying to rid his office of the pesky flies that are a by-product of the...
Beyond the Book
Just as "Joanie Loves Chachi" and "Laverne & Shirley" spun off with a focus
on minor characters originally seen in the original television series "Happy
Days," so too are there literary spinoffs. A spinoff is different from a sequel in
that it does not continue the protagonist's story, instead it is drawn either
from the backstory or from the viewpoint of a secondary character who appears in
the original tale. In literature, as in life, every well-drawn individual can be
the star of their own show. In
A Vengeful Longing Morris takes the
relatively minor-yet-key character of the police magistrate and makes him the
center of his own set of novels (consisting so far of
The Gentle Axe and
A Vengeful Longing). It is, to my limited
knowledge, the...
