SLATTON

SLATTON
Niama L. Williams
Copyright 2008
508 words


    It is a good book, Father Mine, earthly father and Heavenly Originator, that makes one want to knock the author a good one halfway through for delaying the love story almost past this indulgent reader's patience.  And then, when the beloved finally reappears, she is in a state further forbidding consummation of what we as readers have known as a one-sided passion.  I nearly summoned my earthly father from the next room to tell him, "Papa, see whom you can find from your days in South Philly.  We got to take this Slatton bitch out."
    But I kept reading.  I kept reading because even though the seemingly endless stretch of characters kept expanding, some of them famous historical figures, some of them not; even though Slatton delayed and delayed and delayed the bringing onstage of a condition of love I know so well—unrequited—the delaying tactics were nothing this intellectual, this spiritual intellectual, could gloss over.
    Buried in Renaissance discussions of sometimes forbidden ideas about God and space; physics and time; alchemy, Cathars and a possibly immortal red-blond people descended from Biblical Adam's son Seth is a long, rambling tale of a pain-filled life eventually graced by a great love but pockmarked by what our hero, Luca Bastardo, perceives as cosmic jokes perpetrated by a divided God, one good, one evil.  What befalls Luca is indeed so relentlessly nefarious I became angry at every mention that without one of many great tragedies he would never have met his great love.
    I met my great love on an ordinary afternoon and would have marked it as no extraordinary occurrence if not for my complete inability to speak upon sight of him.  Those who know me even slightly know the fluidity of both my pen and tongue, the easygoing grace of my engaging extrovert personality.  Speechlessness had never before visited my countenance, not even on Christmas morning as I contemplated an unusually welcome gift.
    The future of my great love still hangs in the balance, and it is the mark of Slatton's skill that as she ends the novel in Bastardo's ultimate sorrow, two deaths that drive him mad, I am touched from Immortal's pages by the fiery deep and abiding love he finally feels from God, and understand that in the end we must all be what we are, my important question answered:  do your business, girl; focus on that company you've built; his arms and financial freedom not long now.
    It is an exceptional book that irritates and annoys us, wears us out and angers us, makes us snappish and yet ultimately communicates that to be all of who you are—even amidst danger—is the finest wine, the headiest elixir.
    Immortal is a long, exhausting, irritating, ennobling read.  I still want to knock Slatton a good one for grieving her character so, but then I want to look deep in her eyes and see what of her soul glistens and shines, indicating wing.