Chuck Hogan

The Town aka Prince of Thieves, Chuck Hogan

ByChristian Sauvé 2010-09-242011-01-04 Book Review

Scribner, 2010 movie tie-in re-edition of 2004 original, 364 pages, C$18.99 tp, ISBN 978-1-4391-9650-2

Sometimes, I wonder if movie adaptations somehow ennoble their source material. Having been made subject to multi-million dollars films and subsequent marketing campaigns, source novels may be given a patina of respectability that would have completely escaped them had they stayed un-adapted. Even unconsciously, readers may be tempted to approach them in a better frame of mind. The movie provides images and sound to the novel’s prose, and so readers may feel as if they’re reading with a subtle wind at their back: they can easily picture characters, read through scenes knowing the overall shape of the plot and enjoy the extra richness of detail that comes from having access to non-spoken exposition, inner monologue and evocative prose. Reader who, like me, have a habit of holding off on books until they’ve seen the movie always benefit by getting more out of the novel after the movie rather than being disappointed by film after the novel.

Those screen-to-page comparisons usually work best when the adaptation is reasonably faithful and when both film and book are worth a look. Pairs like Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves and Ben Affleck’s The Town, for instance. Renamed on-screen, most likely to avoid any confusion with memories of Kevin Costner’s 1992 Robin Hood film, Hogan’s novel is decently adapted, with enough differences to make happy viewers out of happy readers and vice-versa.

Set in 1996 Boston, Prince of Thieves studies a professional bank robber named Doug MacRay, a once-promising hockey player who has since recycled himself in the criminal underground as the planner of elaborate bank robberies and armoured-car assaults. Hailing from the North-shore neighbourhood of Charlestown, Doug and friends are the kind of robbers who do a job every few months, supplementing their cover jobs with extra cash. But as the novel begins, one member of the group decides during a heist to take hostage a young manager named Claire, a decision that puts extra pressure on the FBI’s robbery unit to track them down and leads Doug to check up on the freed Claire days after the robbery. Romantic complications soon ensue. Doug, as it turns out, really wants to escape the criminal lifestyle… but first he will have to come clean to Claire, and find a way to leave his friends behind.

Criminal thrillers are a dime a dozen, but Prince of Thieves is better than most. Its most obvious advantage would be the satisfyingly complex plot, which mixes friendships, romance, drama, thrills and procedural details about bank robberies. Hogan can rely on a plot that allows him to touch upon a number of sub-themes, and the novel is compelling for the way the characters are stuck between mutually contradictory emotions as they try to manoeuver between their loyalties and their true desires. It’s a rich, old-fashioned narrative, occasionally peppered with a few action scenes. The criminals moving the novel forward are experts at what they do, and so are the FBI agents tracking them: the result is a detailed look at the state of bank robberies as of 1996, perhaps the last great era for grabbing physical money.

Hogan can write as well as he plots, and there are a number of turns of phrase in Prince of Thieves that are good enough to appreciate on their own. His writing isn’t pared-down, but it’s straightforward and evocative. Needless to say, the novel has a strong lower-class Boston-based atmosphere that ties the characters and plotting together. It’s the written equivalent to a well-edited film: it just flows forward, rewarding the audience along the way.

Comparisons between both forms of Hogan’s story will note that the film is lighter on technical explanations, and for some mysterious reason avoids replicating the movie theatre robbery that is one of the book’s standout sequences. Much of the structure of the book is otherwise kept intact, save for a greatly reduced subplot involving the FBI agent character. Both versions of the story end up with a daring robbery at Fenway Park and a thrilling chase down nearby streets. The one significant difference that audiences are likely to remember, however, is that the film has a vastly more optimistic ending –one that delivers full satisfaction on the story’s central emotional conflict. Seeing the film will allow readers to select their own favourite ending, which is another unfair advantage for adapted works: It’s easy to blend both takes in memory and think about a hybrid version that incorporates the best dialogue, the most striking moments and the most satisfying ending. When a good novel begets a good film, it’s like getting the best of both medium… and there’s no artificial ennobling involved.

Movie Review

The Town (2010)

ByChristian Sauvé 2010-09-172014-11-04 Movie Review

(In theatres, September 2010) Who would have thought that barely seven years after the nadir of Gigli, Ben Affleck would re-emerge as a significant director of Boston-based crime dramas? Strange but true: After wowing reviewers with Gone Baby Gone, Affleck is back with another Boston thriller in The Town, this time taking a look at a gang of professional bank robbers as one of them begins a relationship with an ex-hostage of theirs. Deceptions accumulate alongside complications as the gang keeps planning heists, the FBI is tracking them closely and the lead character wants out of his own life. It’s the complex mixture of crime, action, romance and drama that makes The Town work, along with a clean direction, a good sense of place and a few capable actors. Jeremy Renner is once again remarkable as a hot-headed criminal, whereas Jon Hamm gets more than his fair share of good lines as a dogged FBI agent. The script feels refreshingly adult, full of difficult entanglements, capable performances and textured moral problems. The adaptation from Chuck Hogan’s novel is decent, although most readers will be amused to note that a movie theatre heist has been replaced by something else entirely. More significant, however, is the flattening of the FBI agent character and the far more optimistic conclusion of the film –in the end, the movie feels more superficial in general but also more satisfying in its closure. The Town isn’t flashy, though, and this may be what separates it from a longer-lasting legacy. No matter, though: it’s a good a satisfying film, and one that confirms what Affleck is now capable of accomplishing.

Book Review

The Strain, Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

ByChristian Sauvé 2010-03-022024-02-06 Book Review

Morrow, 2009, 401 pages, C$34.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-155823-8

Any review of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain can start from an embarrassing number of attention-grabbing hooks: The celebrity stunt-writing aspect; the resurgence of the evil-vampire breed; the post-9/11 New York setting; the first-book-in-a-trilogy angle. They all compete for attention, obscuring the fact that the book reads like an average middle-of-the-road horror novel with techno-thriller overtones.

It would be easy to focus exclusively on Guillermo del Toro, who’s one of the finest genre horror director currently working. Few others combine his rich affection for the fantastic, his storytelling skills and his strong visual imagination. But his obvious influence on The Strain seems limited to two things. First: how the vampires have a striking similarity to the ones in del Toro’s own Blade 2. Second, how his name alone seems to have added 5$ to the book’s cover price for a shoddily-made hardcover. Otherwise, one would assume that the book has been written in more or less the same way as other celebrity collaborations: Ideas and concepts from the celebrity, actual writing from the below-the-line writer. In this case Chuck Hogan, taking a detour in horror after his rather good crime novels Prince of Thieves and others.

The resurgence of the evil vampire as an antagonist is only noteworthy thanks to a blip in popular culture that, from Lestat de Lioncourt to Edward Cullen while passing through a good chunk of the paranormal romance genre, had momentarily de-fanged the vampire in quasi-genre literature. One notes, however, that most of this vampiric denaturation has occurred at the borders of the genre, and not too often within horror itself: The “return of the evil vampire” was never needed for core horror fans. Still, del Toro and Hogan make no secret of what they’re trying to do in this novel: As vampires land in Manhattan, it’s time for a zombie epidemic scenario featuring blood-suckers.

The post-9/11 setting offers a few more interesting opportunities for critical commentary, especially considered within the book’s techno-thriller affections. From the Dracula-inspired opening sequence in which a Boeing 777 lies immobile on the JFK tarmac with only four survivors left inside, The Strain co-opts some of the techno-thriller tricks to heighten its depiction of an initial vampire outbreak. We get short chapters alternating between many narrative viewpoints. We get tons of historical and technical details weaved into the fabric of the story. We even get historical flashbacks explaining back-story, familiar characters, one-off vignettes in which the viewpoint character ends up dying horribly and use of landmark locations in action set-pieces. (Or, as it happens, the use of former landmark locations in action set-pieces.)

It may be familiar, but it works well: The opening sequence is creepy in part because it explains so patiently how official authorities would react to a supernatural mystery. The picture that del Toro and Hogan end up creating of modern New York feels convincing, and does much to distinguish this novel from others in the same pack. The use of thriller plot mechanics also allows the story to tackle a bigger canvas than other horror novels, which is practically a necessity in this avowed first volume of a trilogy that seems headed for global apocalypse.

This potential for scope and breath, however, remains the most distinctive element of a novel that remains overly familiar in its other aspects. If the vampire/zombie hybrids feel as if they stepped out of Blade 2, the human characters also seem to come out of Central Casting: Give me an overworked divorced scientist, a wizened holocaust survivor and a level-headed blue-collar worker! The entire narrative thrust of the novel is just as ordinary, down to the convenient “kill the head of the vampires and the rest will die” plot device. The satisfaction-denied ending is also predictable from the moment we understand that this is the first volume of a trilogy.

The good news are that this first volume does set up a promising follow-up, and that it’s solid enough to please horror fans looking for an uncompromisingly gory take on the vampire genre. The Strain is forthright enough to announce that the two other volumes in the trilogy, The Fall and The Night Eternal, will be forthcoming in June 2010 and 2011. Hopes are that they will take the story in more original territory.

[October 2010: The Fall is a decent follow-up in that it continues the story is pretty much the same way, using pretty much the same characters and monsters. While the apocalyptic atmosphere is stronger, the techno-thriller detailing isn’t as strong. Traditional narrativus interruptus is typical for a second-volume-in-a-trilogy. Recommended for fans of the first book, although it won’t make new converts to the series.]

[January 2024: Oof — it took nearly fourteen years, but I finally made my way to The Night Eternal, third and concluding volume of The Strain trilogy. Never mind why, or how there was time in-between my buying the book and reading it for packing/unpacking my personal library three times and for a complete four-season TV show adaptation (which I haven’t seen) to be announced, produced, released and forgotten. This third volume is actually quite a bit more interesting than I expected — to the point that I seriously thought about reviewing it at length rather than hide it as an appendix to the review of the first volume. But here goes, summarized: The post-apocalyptic setting of this third volume is unbelievable and overdone, but it does take the series to a logical and intriguing conclusion: “What if the vampires got everything they wanted?” It’s a third book that absolutely nails the tone of what a concluding installment should deliver: big payoffs, high drama and a nearly operatic conclusion. Less happily, it transitions from a techno-thriller rationalist perspective to one in which biblical mumbo-jumbo ends up “explaining” everything. At least the book does, once again, make good use of its New York City locations. Amazingly enough, the third act leaves Manhattan and makes its way north, north, north… until it lands in the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River — less than two hundred kilometers from where I live. The story itself may be interesting in many ways, but I’m not sure I’d classify it as completely successful: There’s a romantic triangle to resolve, a family unit to disintegrate, old rivalries still burning bright after a two-year time-skip after the end of western civilization, and more contrivances than I care to highlight. The nominal protagonist of the series has become a laughingstock of a junkie in order to set up his redemption arc, while his son is being turned into a vampire in many different ways. As a reviewer getting back into the book-criticism game, I found it all interesting, but I could see how it would divide other readers — especially those who don’t pass by the Thousand Islands one a year. Still, I’d rather have a flawed wild ride than the too-safe approach taken by the first volume. In many ways, I wonder if a fourteen-year break between the second and third book may have worked to the third’s advantage: my expectations were nil except to get the book out of my to-read pile. Now let’s have a look at that TV show…]

[February 2024: Ooh, how interesting. I just watched (sometimes casually) The Strain TV show, and it’s a fascinating case study in adaptation. Adapting a trilogy in a four-season show is not the same process as making a film out of a novel: While the latter means abridgement and concision, del Toro and Hogan had to go the other way in transforming their work into thirty-plus hours of running time: New characters are introduced, subplots expanded, second thoughts executed and entire dramatic arcs changed. Sure, it starts with that immobile 777 on the JFK tarmac — but as the series develops, the differences get wilder and wilder. The overall story scope is often smaller (the infection remains limited to New York City; the climax never leaves the island), there’s a lot of flashback-filler, some plot threads take forever to develop, and the series can never decide whether it’s committing to the vampire-plague apocalypse or not. More significantly, the fates and arcs of some characters are significantly altered in the adaptation. I ended up liking Fet a lot more due to actor Kevin Durand; I ended up liking Eph somewhat less even if he was played by the normally reliable Cliff Stoll. The increasing differences in plot as the series progressed actually kept my interest up — the moment some characters died early on, I couldn’t necessarily predict the specifics of the episode-to-episode plotting. Past the end of the first season, The Strain TV Show is absolutely not a faithful adaptation of the trilogy — which may be for the best… and illustrate just how off-base the third volume is compared to the two first ones.]