When a young Japanese woman requests his help to discover how her mother was killed, the author begins to illuminate the hidden side of the decorated man.
Richard McMahon’s THE DARK SIDE OF GLORY is an ambitious novel. It’s a thriller that switches ably between two settings and time periods, the earlier of which is a rarely-written about portion of American history, the Korean War. Readers familiar with military ranks, titles, and culture will be drawn in by the author’s detailed world-creation. Switching between timelines is done seamlessly–the tension between events in the past and their repercussions on the future are a source of curiosity and excitement, and McMahon balances this quite capably. The modern storyline hooks readers with its engaging lead character as well as the somewhat prurient nature of the murder he reluctantly investigates.
Unfortunately, the author chooses to traffic in offensive stereotypes of Asian people. He notes “gap-toothed smiles” and the characters’ accents are noted by phonetic spellings that have long been regarded as outdated representations of how a person might speak. “‘Dee wirin my har rise a merody…’ The Japanese male singer tried bravely to make his voice heard…” is one such approximation of the speech patterns of these characters.
While the attitudes and perspectives of people in the 1950s would undoubtedly be similar to this, the way the author chooses to portray the characters does not acknowledge how wrong-headed the stereotypes are. When the stereotypes and slurs are represented in a character’s dialogue it is an understandable liberty–attitudes of the time were certainly less enlightened than modern ones. However, when the remarks on physical appearance and speech are part of the third person, it seems to reflect more on the author’s personal imaginings and beliefs of how Asian people look and talk: “He would have been handsome, except for thick, ill-fitting glasses, which gave him a slightly comical appearance.” Additionally, almost all of the women in the book are one dimensional, identified by descriptions of their “delicate, ethereal beauty” or “striking beauty”, the latter of which is used for multiple characters.
THE DARK SIDE OF GLORY is a taut military suspense novel, though some word choices and one-dimensional female characters overwhelmingly weaken the story.
~ IndieReader