Feb 18, 2001 12:02 PM
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A crack in his bluest of skies Sidney Sheldon has sealed his fate as far as a wholesome literary career is concerned. This ‘Master of the Game’ who penned intrigue classics like ‘The Rage of Angels’ ‘Memories of Midnight’ and ‘If Tomorrow Comes’ has definitely lost his flair for clever storytelling; a trait he was more than just famous for. Either he clears up the now filmy cobwebs in his head or just pack up his bags and hitchhike ‘Holly wood or Bust’. At least in tinsel town he’ll be safe from the accusations of being a entrepreneur of cliched potboilers.
‘The Sky is Falling’ follows the no-good travails and globe trotting adventures of a hotshot, international news correspondent Dana Evans. This Sheldon heroine unlike her predecessors, Tracy Whitney, Lara Cameron, etc, loses out on a vital, integral virtue, that of pure grit. She plays an unlikely Sam Spade (the Dashiell Hammett character) hopping from one country to another at the drop of a clue or lead. The distance to these locations covered in one page flat for each destination. Talk about this being the jet age (and the fact that such a sought after international news anchor can afford to take so much off from his day job. Any more TV stations that cut their star reporters more slack?)!
Her main objective; to investigate a series of accidental deaths involving the members of a high profile American family, The Winthrops. An utterly lame and loose context inspired by the Kennedy family tragedies.
Dana’s colossal attempts at unraveling this mystery are beleaguered and convoluted in their execution. When the various layers are slowly peeled away she unearths a nefarious global conspiracy involving the US government some Russian nuclear plant of some sort. Now where have heard all this sort of innuendo before?
There are two added capsules of actualized melodrama; one an ineffective, jerry-rigged love triangle of sorts with Dana at one angle, her sports journalist fiance Jeff at one end and Jeff’s supermodel ex-wife at the final angle. I frankly considered this diagram an unnecessary element, my thought stems from a plain and simple fact; it has no judicious relevance to the story’s main framework. The second unwanted caplet is the character of Kemal, the cripple boy from Bosnia Dana adopts during her hiatus during the crisis.
I mean seriously, as avid readers, how many times do we have to be subjected to these ‘post-cold’ war syndrome conspiracy stereotypes, with power hungry manifestations laced within the storylines.
‘The sky is falling’ surely is no different. In fact this below-average, so-called ‘Sidney’s Sheldon’s hallmark’, thriller reveals a most disappointing side to this master anecdotist. Such creative inconsistency from a reputed novelist of his caliber is a great let down. But then a true follower of his craft would know for a fact that there were instances where his silver armor has shown traces of tarnish (‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, ‘Morning, Noon and Night’, ‘The Best Laid Plans’ and ‘Tell Me Your Dreams’).
Ardent a fan of Sheldon’s that I am, the release of each book brought with it the hope that I would get the piece of writing I craved. But with one let down after another five books in a row, I’m not sure I can go through this one more time.
On a final note pick up and venture into ‘The Sky Is Falling’ at your own unsolicited risk.
