Forgotten Books: CONTROL -- William Goldman

William Goldman's written some wonderful books, both fiction and nonfiction, and these days I suspect he's best known for The Princess Bride, a favorite of mine. But at one time Goldman was considered one of the premier thriller writers. In fact, two of the reviews quoted in the front pages of this book use the word thriller to describe it. Which just goes to show how the meaning of that word has changed in the last 30 years or so.

This Dell paperback edition of Control is a bit over 300 pages long with really tiny print. Very little of it is taken up with action, though when the action comes, it's intense. The first 100 pages or so is all backstory about various characters. There's a prison break, but even that's pretty low-key. In other words, this isn't what you'd expect from a thriller written in 2010. I wonder if the book would even be published now, because what Goldman did in a lot of his books was give you a bunch of disparate characters going about their lives and leaving you to wonder what the connections were among them, or even if there were any connections. There are, of course, and everything comes together, in one of the wildest plots Goldman ever concocted. It's part SF, part . . . I'm not even going to say, because that would spoil the whole book. There's one thing I should warn you about if you've never read Goldman before: anybody can die at any time. He loves to kill of sympathetic characters.

This isn't my favorite Goldman novel. It's almost too far-fetched even for me. But the characters and the writing make up for it, and the plotting carried me right along. Even re-reading it was fun. If you haven't read Goldman, you might not want to start with this one, though. Try Marathon Man, Magic, or The Color of Light. Avoid Brothers, a sequel to Marathon Man that I didn't like at all.