Andrew Smith's Reviews > Touched

One of the strangest books I’ve read in quite a while!

Martin Just awakes one morning feeling like he’s been asleep for a hundred years. Wondering naked on to his balcony, he quickly finds himself accosted by police. Martin is a black man living in the affluent Hollywood hills of Los Angeles - is he being picked out, victimised? Worse is to come, as he’s thrown into a cell to be joined sometime later by a huge white supremacist intent on doing him serious harm.

What happens next is a little hard to fathom, but Martin is concious that he’s on a mission, that he’s been chosen. He’s not the only one, he's aware that there are others too. This discovery has emerged, he knows, from the long sleep. Now he’s two people, a Jekyll and Hyde, a man who is a stranger to violence and also a man who embraces it. He’s not sure how events will manifest but he understands that if he is ‘life’, then he must face down he who is ‘death’.

At times I found the narrative incomprehensible. It lurches from one strange scene to the next, piling one surreal event on top of another. The action scenes are straight out of a Marvel comic book, but the language and and the writing is that of a serious wordsmith. It’s incongruous. I'm afraid it's just too much for me.

I’ve enjoyed Mosley’s writing in the past, The Awkward Black Man is one of the finest collection of short stories I’ve read, and I’ve always been impressed by the way refuses to be locked into one particular style (compare Cinnamon Kiss to John Woman, for example). With this book he’s moving into John Boyne territory in terms of expanding his range, but I'm afraid it just didn’t work for me. On the plus side, it’s a short piece so I was able to complete it in one sitting.

My thanks to Grove Atlantic for providing an ARC of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.