Hardboiled male eggs

>> Power tools figure big in bloody Afterburn

by JULIET WATERS

Dedicating a novel to your father doesn't usually raise any eyebrows. Unless you're Colin Harrison, husband of writer Kathryn Harrison, who achieved more than her fair share of celebrity in 1997 with The Kiss, an autobiography about her four-year-long incestuous affair with her father.

But those curious about what Colin Harrison's third novel, Afterburn, might have to say about his own relationship with his father will be largely disappointed. There's precious little dirt about fathers in this noir hole of a thriller. If there's any negative message, it's that for a woman with a brain these days, fathers are nice but ultimately unnecessary accessories. Compared to Harrison's wife's lurid and complicated illustration of fatherhood, Afterburn almost seems to be a bloodless dismissal of the concept.

When I say bloodless I don't mean there's no blood in this novel. Afterburn is plenty bloody. Power tools play an important role, but never as Father's Day presents. They're used as torture instruments to elicit secrets, saw off limbs, drill holes in ankles, etc.

The novel opens in 1972 in a Viet Cong P.O.W. camp, where fighter pilot Charlie Ravich is being tortured by starvation, dehydration, sleep deprivation, slow strangulation and beatings with inner tubes. Methods that will seem quaint 37 years later when Charlie meets the Brooklyn Mafia.

Charlie escapes prison camp, but only after having a testicle accidentally shot off by Marines who discover him. Decades later, in September of 1999, we find him a wealthy executive doing business in Shanghai. He's a good man. Unerringly faithful to his wife and desperately concerned about his 35-year-old daughter Julia's ninth attempt at in vitro fertilization. Still, when he witnesses the death of a dinner companion, a prominent Chinese businessman who has a heart attack on the toilet, he doesn't think twice about rushing to the phone to turn the death into a quick $16-million stock option windfall.

What to do with this money? Buy a baby. Not for Julia, whose husband, Brian, is against adoption. "Brian doesn't want a little Guatemalan baby or a Lithuanian baby or anybody else's baby but his own. It's about his own goddamn penis. If it doesn't come out of his penis, then it's no good." An attitude that Charlie silently agrees with: when it becomes clear that his daughter's infertility means that his line will die out, he decides to use his $8 million, after taxes, to set up a trust fund for a baby he plans to conceive, but never see. He's happy enough to die knowing that the fruit of his loins may still be out there doing it's little bit against Asian world domination.

Enter Christina Welles, the eventual receptacle for Charlie's sperm. Young, tough, sexy, Columbia educated... and just about to be released from prison. The reason behind the release is a mystery, since she still has three years left of a seven-year sentence for grand larceny. But it's a good guess that the Mafia is behind it. In a better world, Christina's brilliant criminal mind would be hard at work for an American corporation, but sadly the mob got to her just as she was getting bored of university. Now she's back on the street, but being pursued by the gangsters who want something from her so bad they're sawing off her ex-boyfriend's limbs to intimidate her.

There's so much macho posturing in this book that it would be campy if there were any humour. But at its worst, it's merely irritating, thanks mostly to Harrison's exceptional talent for plotting. Ultimately, hardboiled doesn't begin to describe this novel; these eggs are carbonized. :

Afterburn by Colin Harrison, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, pb, 435pp, $35.99