ZodWallop reviewed The Ninja by Eric Van Lustbader (Nicholas Linnear, #1)
Special appearance by the Ninja
3 stars
I picked up The Ninja hoping for the literary equivalent of the old Cannon schlock-action Ninja movies. And at its’ best, The Ninja is that. But the problem is that too often the book is something else, something less good.
The book starts with a bang, as a ninja assassinates... some guy. But then, ugh, this book gets awful. The next hundred or so pages or so are a romance. We spend time getting to know our leads, Nicholas and Justine as they get to know each other. I hated them.
Nicholas was a vapid Mary Sue who made major life-changes for no discernible reason at all. Early on he abruptly quits his advertising job on the brink of wild success. But no worries, he is offered a job as a teacher at Columbia despite his lack of qualification or any interest in the job.
Justine came …
I picked up The Ninja hoping for the literary equivalent of the old Cannon schlock-action Ninja movies. And at its’ best, The Ninja is that. But the problem is that too often the book is something else, something less good.
The book starts with a bang, as a ninja assassinates... some guy. But then, ugh, this book gets awful. The next hundred or so pages or so are a romance. We spend time getting to know our leads, Nicholas and Justine as they get to know each other. I hated them.
Nicholas was a vapid Mary Sue who made major life-changes for no discernible reason at all. Early on he abruptly quits his advertising job on the brink of wild success. But no worries, he is offered a job as a teacher at Columbia despite his lack of qualification or any interest in the job.
Justine came off as a snob who speaks like Mrs. Howell and also casually refers to homosexuals with British slang for cigarettes. I understand the book was written in 1982, but even in the 40's, authors knew that having their femme fatale casually use at-the-time acceptable slurs would be a turn-off.
I finally understand what is meant by 'florid prose'. It's almost like two writers wrote this book: when the POV is on a minor character, the writing is decent enough. But when the POV shifts to our hero, oh buddy. Such gems as "He was quite startled to see that her face in profile seemed remarkably different, as if he was seeing her now from the perspective of a different age, some other life." A little of this would be fine, but it is paragraph after paragraph. We're talking romance novel levels of turgidness.
I was also surprised by the porn-y detailed descriptions of sex. Hey, I enjoy me some smut. But the graphic sex combined with the purple prose made me laugh out loud at least once.
Also, the book wallows in the 'inscrutable Asian' stereotype. Or, to be generous, Romantic Orientalism. The idea that Asian mindsets were just so different from our Western ways that we just couldn't understand. And this book was published several years after Shōgun was a pop-culture juggernaut.
The Ninja is overly long. It could easily have lost two hundred pages, as it spends time covering the history of Japan from the end of World War II which is all interesting, but at best tangentially related to our New York story of a ninja hunting down a scummy billionaire. On the other hand, the love story of Nick and Justine wouldn’t have kept me reading. The extra bits and bobs did. So maybe it was a smart move.
Finally, after far too many pages, the ninja remembers why he’s in the story and that’s when I finally started to get my Golan & Globus cheesy action film goodness. Lustbader doesn’t write the best action scenes, but they were good enough.
Lustbader doesn’t stick the landing though. The book comes to a natural end, but it is stretched out with an unsatisfying plot twist and set-up for the sequel.
In the end, eh, it was fine. But the negatives outweighed the positives. I doubt I’ll read the sequel.
