The Gates

AUTHOR: John Connelly

PUBLISHED: 2010

GENRE: Fiction

The Gates is the story of Samuel Johnson and his little dog, Boswell*.  Samuel is a brilliant yet quirky English 11-year-old who is trick-or-treating two days early (to beat the crowds, he explains) when he happens to witness his neighbors accidently opening a portal to hell.  Across Europe, the Large Hadron Supercollider is operating as normal when a molecule of energy flies off and disappears, just before a deep voice from nowhere starts telling the scientists to fear it.  As you can imagine, it all goes downhill from there. 

Samuel is a prime example of the go-to character of the moment: the brilliant but socially awkward young man.  He is almost always in his early teens, and his teachers and fellow students find him confounding.  He can’t lie and often doesn’t get it when others lie.  He doesn’t have much better luck with social cues and situations.  He is almost always accompanied by a long-suffering mother who wearily answers his endless questions, his father having died or abandoned them long ago.  It can seem like every book you open lately has this character at its heart.**  As a result, Samuel’s “quirks” just seem tired.  The only other character that gets any real development is, oddly enough, Nurd, the Scourge of Five Demons.  Nurd is himself a demon (albeit a lowly one) who’s been banished to the Wasteland with nothing but a chair and an ugly, even lowlier demon to serve him.  Nurd is the only personality in the book that experiences any character growth.  Everyone else stays exactly the same. 

The writing is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek representation of the British – “dear me, there appears to be a demon in my garden.  And right before tea.  Tsk, that just won’t do” – but Connelly goes completely overboard with it.  Nothing rankles these people.  Samuel has a calm and substantial conversation with the monster hiding under his bed.  When the demons attack one home, the man of the house chases them away from his rose bushes and then returns to tend the broken stems.  Children dressed as ghouls take on real ghouls, then finish trick-or-treating.  Connelly takes pains to describe the monstrosity of these creatures, and the pain and torment they intend to rain down on the inhabitants of Earth.  One would think, therefore, the humans would react with a little more fear and panic. 

The chapter titles are cutesy missives such as “In Which the Universe Forms, Which Seems Like a Very Good Place to Start” and “In Which We Encounter a Small Boy, His Dog, and Some People Who Are Up to No Good”, the up-to-no-good people being the afore-mentioned evil-summoning neighbors, who should really be described as something more severe than “up to no good”.  The book is also filled with – here we go again – annoying footnotes.  A footnote to a discussion of the Big Bang reminds us that, as atoms as constantly recycled, we all have a little bit of Julius Caesar in us, which is the same “fun” little fact that annoying guy at the party tells whatever pretty girl he encounters.  Another footnote attached to the introduction of the source of all evil, known as the  Great Malevolence, defines malevolence for the reader then admonishes them for not paying attention in school, which is not only distracting but insulting to those of us who already knew what malevolence meant. 

The Gates resides in adult fiction but was apparently designed to cross-over into Young Adult fiction as an adult book for children, or the other way around.  This might explain some of its heavy handedness, but really, there’s no excuse for it.  Teenagers don’t need that kind of exaggerated writing any more than adults do.  It’s too bad.  If Connelly had tempered himself, he might have had something really interesting. 

LENGTH: 304 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT?: Methinks his usual stuff – thrillers – is more popular.

SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: No. When the science behind a portal of hell opening onto our universe is the most believable part of the story, you’ve got a serious problem.

*Boswell, as you may know, refers to James Boswell, best-known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, the prominent 18^th century writer.  That kind of wink-wink, do-you-get-it? naming put me off from the very start.

**Most recently, I encountered him as Oscar from Extremely Loud and Incredible Close, which you will not see reviewed here, since I could not force myself to finish it.  I am, however, going to ignore my own rule and see the movie.