Read This: The Plain Man

I’ve mentioned, over the years, at Beatrice and other websites, the enormous impact that reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati had on me when I first read it as a teenager, and the many times I’ve re-read it as an adult. It’s been very hard to find another occult-themed thriller that’s both as taut in the storytelling and covers the magical stuff as intelligently. (Although I’ve come to respect The Lost Symbol, my general opinion of Dan Brown’s prose is unfavorable to say the least.) Steve Englehart’s The Plain Man hasn’t quite supplanted Masks in my mental hierarchy, but it’s about the best I’ve seen in a long while, and I was entertained from start to finish as I read it for Shelf Awareness.

The Plain Man is the third in a series of novels that actually began thirty years ago; before that, Steve Englehart was best known as one of the most prominent and prolific comic book writers of the 1970s, with a string of hit titles at both Marvel and DC. (I first discovered his work a decade later, when he was writing The West Coast Avengers and then The Green Lantern Corps.) It was during his run on Dr. Strange, Marvel’s “Sorcerer Supreme,” that Englehart first got seriously interested in magick, and a lot of what he learned during his research went into his first novel, The Point Man, which introduced the character of Max August, a San Francisco DJ who stumbled into an occult offshoot of the Cold War and wound up becoming a student of the magical arts. I kept thinking I should email Englehart one of these days and ask him why it took nearly three decades for the sequel, The Long Man, to show up; then I turned to Google and I found out he hadn’t originally planned any sequels. I guess I could ask him why he changed his mind…

Anyway, Englehart’s come up with a perfectly good narrative reason for why a character who ought to be pushing 60 isn’t, and his understanding of magick has gone in some intriguing directions in the intervening years, incorporating both the Mayan calendar and an intricate astrological system that accounts for 260 asteroids. He’s also worked two comic book characters he created in the 1980s, the trickster god Coyote and the immortal Scorpio Rose, into the storyline, and it’s nice to see how they fit right in with Max and his new girlfriend/magical trainee. As far as the story goes, Max’s battle against the vast right-wing conspiracy and all that, it’s pure pop entertainment, but that doesn’t mean Englehart’s dumbing anything down here, not by a long shot. The thing is, you really shouldn’t come into The Plain Man cold; Englehart may provide a lot of background (including, admittedly, a few clunky bits of exposition), but there’s no substitute for starting at the beginning and tackling the entire saga. And, hey, at least this way you don’t have to wait thirty years to see how things turn out!

14 June 2011 | read this |