Day of Absolution

by John Gardner

Retired spy Charlie Gauntlet heads for Ireland with his cop wife to track down a nasty assassin called the Alchemist, thus embarking on a treacherous journey that involves an ancient manuscript and a notorious British turncoat.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Before coming an author of fiction in the early 1960s, John Gardner was variously a stage magician, a Royal Marine officer and a journalist. In all, Gardner has fifty-four novels to his credit, including Maestro, which was the New York Times book of the year. He was also invited by Ian Fleming’s literary copyright holders to write a series of continuation James Bond novels, which proved to be so successful that instead of the contracted three books he went on to publish some fourteen titles, including Licence Renewed and Icebreaker.

Having lived in the Republic of Ireland, the United States and the UK, John Gardner sadly died in August of 2007 having just completed his third novel in the Moriarty trilogy, Conan Doyle’s eponymous villain of the Sherlock Holmes series.

Reviews

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine this book is divided into 10 roughly equal parts. I quite liked parts one and nine, and part ten wasn't bad. That leaves a lot that disappoints.

You can further divide the book into three, or I would say four, subplots. It is the nature of subplots to parallel and comment on each other or to dovetail at some point in the book, or both. These do both, but not convincingly. The couple who are the protagonists are not together enough to really interact with the couple who are the antagonists, and through much of the book these parallels are so separate that these characters barely constitute pro- and antagonists. What I call the fourth subplot, the translation of a possibly ancient manuscript (is it? that is the question) does not work for me because it is so unconvincingly executed. While the book does not ultimately come down on one side or the other, Gardner simply posits questions about the manuscript and does not choose sides. Problem is, that if you have read many ancient manuscripts, I have, this one is entirely unconvincing. It includes the kinds of details and psychological insights that people include when writing today. These are all but totally absent in real actual ancient writings. Throughout the book, I wondered if Gardner was simply inept at creating an faux-ancient manuscript or if he wanted readers to know it was phony. I'm still not sure. There are many dull patches in the laborious readings of this manuscript as there are in all of the subplots. The bringing together of the subplots involving the protagonists is utterly unconvincing. That they would be working on different threads of the same problem is beyond credulity.

Gardner wrote a sprawling, ambitious thriller that raises certain philosophical and religious questions, but simply was not on top of the material. He gets an E for effort, but a D for execution.

[Nicholas George · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not too wild about this one. The married spy couple trying to return to a normal life in thier mature years are intriguing, and the contract killer subplot creates a fair amount of suspense. But the bizarre subplot about the newly discovered account of Jesus' life never did fit in with the rest of the novel. Too many characters and past histories buzzing around to make this worthwhile.

[M. W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a satisfying post-cold war book, and they got the bad guys in the end and the protagonist and heroine were married and saved each other....sigh...