Post by darkstar3 on Mar 25, 2011 3:48:17 GMT
Jim Morrison Can’t Rest In Peace
North Jersey News
By: Michael Prager
September 21 2002
THE POET IN EXILE, by Ray Manzarek; Thunder Mouth, 210 pages $22.95
What’s it like t live at the right hand of greatness and then to have it taken away? One answer might be found in the life of Ray Manzarek, who helped make the whirlwind that was the Sixties band The Doors and who continues to play its wake, better than three decades after Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub.
Manzarek and his fellow survivors continued to record for a while after the death of Morrison, The Doors’ lead singer and spirit, and Manzarek later wrote “Light My Fire,” a memoir of that time.
Now he penned “The Poet In Exile,” a noel whose quirks make it more interesting than enjoyable.
It begins with a conceivable premise, that Morrison suffered a heart attack that night in 1971 but faked his death to escape his stardom and that persona he had built.
It’s not a bad idea, just as it wasn’t a bad idea when “Eddie and the Cruisers” came to the screen in 1983.
What should set “The Poet In Exile” apart, of course, is Manzarek. As the band’s keyboard player, he should be in the ideal position to compose an alternative ending. But the advantage can be a hindrance, as well. The reader is constantly wondering: How much is fiction, and how much is fictionalized?
It must have been a difficult line for Manzarek to tread. Hewing entirely to reality would have duplicated his memoir and probably would have been a lot less fun to write.
But creating at totally fictionalized account of a rock singer who faked his own death, without leaning on the Morrison connection, would have produced – “Eddie and the Cruisers.” Not only has that story been done, but its been done better than this.
Manzarek’s foreshadowing can be monotonous; he repeats phrasing maddeningly, and there’s a droning of quality to it all.
The dialogue in “The Poet In Exile” ranges from pedestrian to tortured. For example, the Poet describes a planter’s punch: “It’s too potent and it’ll sneak up on you like a water moccasin coming out from under a tangle of mangrove roots.” Poet or not, what bar-stool sot ever spoke like that?
The novel’s plot is barely more enticing. Manzarek is at home with his family in California when he gets the first of a series of postcards sent from the Seychelles Islands. After the third one, he decides to go there, to find whoever is sending the cards. So he hops a plane and, within two days of arrival find the Poet from amount 100,000 inhabitants.
One implication of this concert is that if Jim were alive, it’s Ray he would most want to see. That may be the truth, but based on the evidence it seems Ray has never been able to leave Jim in peace.
bergen.com/cgi-bin/page.pl?id=234175
North Jersey News
By: Michael Prager
September 21 2002
THE POET IN EXILE, by Ray Manzarek; Thunder Mouth, 210 pages $22.95
What’s it like t live at the right hand of greatness and then to have it taken away? One answer might be found in the life of Ray Manzarek, who helped make the whirlwind that was the Sixties band The Doors and who continues to play its wake, better than three decades after Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub.
Manzarek and his fellow survivors continued to record for a while after the death of Morrison, The Doors’ lead singer and spirit, and Manzarek later wrote “Light My Fire,” a memoir of that time.
Now he penned “The Poet In Exile,” a noel whose quirks make it more interesting than enjoyable.
It begins with a conceivable premise, that Morrison suffered a heart attack that night in 1971 but faked his death to escape his stardom and that persona he had built.
It’s not a bad idea, just as it wasn’t a bad idea when “Eddie and the Cruisers” came to the screen in 1983.
What should set “The Poet In Exile” apart, of course, is Manzarek. As the band’s keyboard player, he should be in the ideal position to compose an alternative ending. But the advantage can be a hindrance, as well. The reader is constantly wondering: How much is fiction, and how much is fictionalized?
It must have been a difficult line for Manzarek to tread. Hewing entirely to reality would have duplicated his memoir and probably would have been a lot less fun to write.
But creating at totally fictionalized account of a rock singer who faked his own death, without leaning on the Morrison connection, would have produced – “Eddie and the Cruisers.” Not only has that story been done, but its been done better than this.
Manzarek’s foreshadowing can be monotonous; he repeats phrasing maddeningly, and there’s a droning of quality to it all.
The dialogue in “The Poet In Exile” ranges from pedestrian to tortured. For example, the Poet describes a planter’s punch: “It’s too potent and it’ll sneak up on you like a water moccasin coming out from under a tangle of mangrove roots.” Poet or not, what bar-stool sot ever spoke like that?
The novel’s plot is barely more enticing. Manzarek is at home with his family in California when he gets the first of a series of postcards sent from the Seychelles Islands. After the third one, he decides to go there, to find whoever is sending the cards. So he hops a plane and, within two days of arrival find the Poet from amount 100,000 inhabitants.
One implication of this concert is that if Jim were alive, it’s Ray he would most want to see. That may be the truth, but based on the evidence it seems Ray has never been able to leave Jim in peace.
bergen.com/cgi-bin/page.pl?id=234175
