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Die Dunklen Gassen Des Himmels (2013)

by Tad Williams(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

3608938346 (ISBN13: 9783608938340)

languge

English

genre

Paranormal Fantasy

publisher

Klett-Cotta

series

Bobby Dollar

review 1: If John constantine had wings then he would be Bobby Dollar.Okay that's only slightly true. Bobby Dollar is an Earth bound angel and therefore doesn't have wings but he is still an angel. Tad Williams employs a first person hard-boiled narrative which owes a lot to the work of Chandler and Hammett. It’s highly enjoyable and allows for a series of very funny observations from the main character as we proceed through the story.The story revolves around the city of San Judas, which seems to be a mixture of Palo Alto and the bay area without actually settling on one area (with the brief exception of the area immediately surrounding Stanford University) and tells the story of Bobby Dollars beat trying to facilitate the ascension of the newly dead to heaven in his job as an ad... morevocate for the recently deceased. Arrayed against him are his opposite numbers from hell whose job it is to claim those souls for Old Nick. Problems arise when Bobby turns up for a job and finds that the soul he was supposed to be defending is not where it should be and no one seems to know what has happened. Frantic questions are asked both in Heaven and Hell and Bobby suddenly finds himself a very wanted man, not least by a huge hell beast called a Ghallu which doesn’t care how much of San Judas it tears up in its quest to hunt him down. Tad Williams takes us on a journey that introduces characters which, although angelic and demonic, have weaknesses that are only too human. This means that whilst the main characters are clearly very powerful beings we can still relate to them and the problems they face, particularly when Bobby embarks on a clandestine relationship with a beautiful demon and the pain and conflict this causes him.The only problem I had was with the fact that there were a number of events that took place that would have effected hundreds if not thousands of people and it was as if nobody noticed. This only happened a couple of times but it did mean that for a brief second I was taken out of the book as I thought “really?” It’s only a minor gripe but still, I think that if a little bit more had been put in to the book to explain or show how the powers that be cover these things up, it would have helped avoid this.The story is fresh in so much as it brings and age old story up to date in the modern world and adds several twists which make for a hugely entertaining story and I would thoroughly recommend this to anybody looking for something a little different.
review 2: The Dirty Streets of Heaven is a mash-up of a noir-lite detective story and angels and demons urban fantasy. It is not as imaginative or entertaining as say the Dresden Files but that doesn't mean it's a bad book.Tad Williams shows a surprising cleverness at trying to turn the big problems with his narrative into strengths but doesn't quite succeed at it (though of course your mileage may vary). For example, I guess it was too controversial for him to declare his story's version of the absolute truth regarding Heaven, Hell, God, the afterlife, etc. so even though his main characters are angels, they are created/born with the conviction that they had past lives as mortals but no memory of their time on Earth, no direct interaction with God, and no knowledge of the answers to life's big questions. Williams then uses this lack of knowledge as an engine to drive large parts of the plot. I think he did that pretty well but I still am not too sure how much I like a novel about the afterlife that refuses to take a position on most of the questions about it. Another example is the prologue which puts the hero into the middle of an action-packed break-in before restarting the story at an earlier point in time. Obviously, authors do that all the time for various reasons of creating foreshadowing or giving some energy to what would otherwise start as somewhat slow, etc but here I think that Williams did it to minimize how monstrously stupid the character was for indulging in that break-in in the first place. Since the reader knows about the event from the literal start of the book, the blithering idiocy demonstrated Bobby Dollar in that instance is lessened a bit by it being a fait accompli that the action is going to happen. Even so, it is still so dumb that Williams has the character directly address its idiocy in an attempt to explain it away that falls completely flat. Other plot holes also occur during and after that scene that I won't describe so as to avoid spoilers.Even with the plot holes, the book can be a lot of fun with entertaining action scenes, an enjoyable main character and some side characters that are fun (if not fully realized people).If you have issues with questionable gender politics/tropes, this book may not be for you. I assume that Tad Williams was having a little fun by fulfilling noir detective story tropes with a femme fatale who is literally a demon with a possible heart of gold. If not, yikes. less

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