Posted:
November 26, 2023
I will look for more Robert Wilson novels
Book Review
By Derryll White
Wilson, Robert (2009). The Ignorance of Blood.
This is the last volume of Robert Wilson’s Javier Falcon quartet. I walked into this novel cold, not having read any of the previous novels. Wilson does a good job of catching the reader up, giving background in a way that I do not think would be redundant to series devotees.
Wilson lives in England, Spain and Portugal and is, therefore, well-informed regarding restaurants, dress, population pressures and other cultural elements that bring the novel alive. Readers who have any familiarity with the laid-back lifestyle of Seville will recognize the flow of residents into fashionable plaza dining establishments around midnight.
This is a story of solid police work but also of love, international intrigue, familial devotion, usury and the sad abuse of women. Robert Wilson doesn’t pull any punches as he reviews Spain’s reliance on cocaine, heroin and prostitutes – 400,000 in a relatively small nation.
The author does his job very well and the conclusion for Javier Falcon is believable and real. I will certainly look for more of Robert Wilson’s novels.
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TODAY’S WORLD – This is the blight of modern mankind he thought, a world so full of accessible information, lives so crammed with work and relationships, people so constantly connectable that we’ve all developed what Alicia Aguado would probably call tochy-rumination. Nothing meditative about it, just a feverish mental grazing.
WRITER’S SENSITIVITY – …she sensed a great trembling inside her as his heart thumped wildly in his throat and she clung on with the thrill welling in her body and he reached a shuddering collapse she lay underneath him, crying and beating the mattress with the flat of her hands.
He rolled to the side, drew a sheet up over them, gathered her quivering back to his chest, where she fluttered against him like a rescued bird. They slept, as still as stone, effigies on an ancient sarcophagus in a moonlit chapel.
RADICAL ISLAM – “They believe that Westerners no longer have the necessary endurance for duty. They attribute it to adjacent culture in which love, money, family – all the things that a Western would betray for – now have greater value than political, patriotic, religious and moral beliefs. The Westerner has become a victim of the importance of self in their minds. And so they wanted to see where on my integral scale did my son and lover appear, compared to what they consider to be more manly beliefs.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org
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