Review for The Coin

The Coin

(#) Jaebi_Lit 2005-05-15

I found the prose to be affected and over the top, an attempt to emulate Jack's exaggerated mode of speech without actually getting into his head, which resulted in an oversaturation of random phrases rather than a judicious use of them here and there to accent his dialogue. My suggestion is to limit the Jack-dialect. However, I thought that the storyline itself was interesting, with the Greek and his explanation of the afterlife. That Jack kept ahold of the coin was curious, but explained in the last paragraph, and I saw it as a token representative of the future booty from Elysium (very nice phrase, the one about plundering Elysium, by the way). The last paragraph was where I thought the annoying dialogue dropped and finally became convincingly grandiose and Jack-like, entirely sincere and yet out of whack with reality in a Jack-ish manner. One might call it delusions of grandeur, except that Jack manages to follow through on his fancy. His idea of pushing Charon overboard and raiding Elysium captures his irreverent, piratical spirit perfectly. In short, the characterisation is good when you express a character's actions and ideas, but it isn't so good when you try to get into their patterns of speech and thought (the way they express their ideas).