Brian Lindenmuth reviews: The Resurrectionist by Jack O'Connell
The Resurrectionist is the story of Sweeney, a druggist by trade, and his son Danny, the victim of an accident that has left him in a persistent coma. Hoping for a miracle, they have come to the fortress like Peck Clinic. What Sweeney comes to realize, though, is that the real cure to his son's condition may lie in Limbo, a fantasy comic book world into which his son had been drawn at the time of his accident.
The Resurrectionist is a novel that so thoroughly blurs and blends the lines between genres that it can't be contained by any one. It's a crime novel, a fantasy novel, a weird novel. It marries language, ideas and storytelling with a surreal interior landscape and in the end becomes its own genre.
On the surface these are characters tropes that we have seen before: biker gangs, mad scientists, distraught fathers and sexy nurses. Not only do they lose their sheen of familiarity as they traverse this landscape but they are developed into complex, sympathetic and fully realized human beings. They are used in such a different way, and new facets are given to them that they become wholly fresh and original. They still maintain their recognizability but they are fresh and unexpected.
The Resurrectionist is a rich, complex and layered novel and to reduce it to any one genre would be unfair. But if you were to categorize it as crime fiction then this is certainly a crime novel that has its eye towards the future rather then the past. This is high wire fiction written without a net. It's challenging and O'Connell doesn't hold your hand and give you any pat answers. What you bring to the reading experience is almost as important as what is written. And the symbiosis of the two will present a different novel, in some ways, for all who read it.