Adventures Unravel on the Streets of Paris

Over the course of four novels, Los Angeles-based writer Peter Gadol has developed a reputation as a writer of stories enriched by multilayered characterizations and complex moral dilemmas. “Light at Dusk,” like his previous novel “The Long Rain,” utilizes these techniques in a story that borrows elements from the suspense-thriller genre but strives for much more.

Will Law is a golden boy, a seasoned, second-generation Foreign Service officer. Most recently assigned to Mexico City, he has left the Foreign Service under a cloud of suspicion that has driven him to seek out Pedro, a lover he has not seen in seven years and who now resides in Paris where he is cataloging an 18th century French architect’s work. But Pedro, despite sharing old history and present passion with Law, recognizes and is wary of the sway the other man has had over his emotions: “All of us know someone we chase our whole lives. An early heartache haunts us across the years and by some ration makes its way into any new romance. . . . Yet now it would appear that the man whom I chased for so long was chasing me. And who was . . . Will Law? I thought I knew him well--but did I?”

The rest of the novel attempts to answer that question, following the two men from their bed onto the streets of present-day Paris, where frightening packs of disaffected youths roam the streets taunting dark-complexioned foreigners, blasting recordings of the French national anthem and worse. Here Gadol strikes an appropriately creepy note as the lovers, especially the more ethnic-looking Pedro, navigate around the troublemakers: “You learned to avoid certain corners, entire blocks,” Pedro recounts. “Each week, it seemed, you rezoned a mental map.”

Law, however, seems oblivious to the dangers and leaves Pedro to meet a retired Foreign Service officer for lunch. In one of the novel’s riskier and ultimately annoying devices, Pedro follows Law as an unseen, quasi-omniscient narrator, virtually spying as Law spars with the older operative, now a public relations consultant for slippery governmental officials, over his reasons for leaving the Foreign Service. It is through Pedro’s eyes that we also observe Law as he becomes embroiled in the kidnapping of Nico, a dark-skinned child he meets in the care of Jorie, an unhappy acquaintance he encounters by chance on the street.

It is here that “Light at Dusk” offers readers the potential for compelling suspense as Law and Jorie try to hide the underlying circumstances of the boy’s kidnapping from the French police, as Pedro and Law take to the streets to look for Nico, or as Law twists his own moral code to rescue the boy. But it is potential that goes largely unrealized, overshadowed as the plot is by the internal debate Law has with his own values (freewill versus the laws of the Foreign Service, pun intended) and indirectly with Pedro’s moral certainties.

Which is unfortunate for the otherwise potent mix of xenophobia, neo-Fascism and political intrigue hovering on the edges of the narrative. But perhaps we have ourselves to blame for our unfulfilled expectations: We readers, like moviegoers, are practically hard-wired to feel certain emotions when a particular set of stimuli are placed before our eyes. Therefore, like it or not, a woman showering alone is almost preordained to evoke anxious dread while kidnapped children are meant to stimulate fear and panic, not the existential dilemma of the soul that Will Law suffers. And since jolts of the more pedestrian, albeit satisfying, emotions are few and far between in this novel, for all its sensitive revelations of character or chillingly rendered scenes of Paris, “Light at Dusk” ultimately fails to consistently engage our deeper, more primal sympathies.