THE BANJO PLAYER

Longtime BookReview.com readers know that I’ve been dealing with Multiple Sclerosis for the past five years. If you’ve really been paying attention, you know that I have a particularly painful form of the disease. I have a lesion in my spinal cord that causes my brain to believe that there are millions of Exacto knives cutting at my skin all the time. I have another that tells the muscles in my back and legs to tighten up, tighten up, tighten up, like making a fist and squeezing your bicep until the pain makes you stop. However, there is no “off switch” included in my muscles, so they’ve been receiving the message to tighten up for years now. I tell you this so you have a general idea of pain I have to deal with on a daily basis. On a good day, I live at a 7 on the doctor’s 1-10 pain scale. Other days, I can reach past a ten and into an eleven.
It is important that you know this so that when I say that Yarney’s book was engrossing enough to make me completely forget my pain, you understand that it isn’t a paper cut we’re talking about here. In the past few years I can count on one hand the number of books that moved me nearly as much as The Banjo Player.
When I first began to write this review, I could think only in adjectives. Enthralling, astonishing, profound, breathtaking, and most important, plausible enough to be true.
I’m not sure how to classify this book. Is it a political thriller? Perhaps it is a romantic mystery. Possibly some kind of cyber-expert conspiracy enigma? Is it reality, packaged to look like fiction? What the Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson did for my idea of consciousness and interpretive reality, The Banjo Player has done for my concept of political motivation and intrigue and the string-pulling conspiracies we all wonder about.
I have no intention of giving away spoilers or writing a synopsis of the book. I believe it is something you must experience on your own. Can I give you an outline of the book? Absolutely not. The plots and sub plots are involved and intricate and woven together so incredibly realistically that sometimes I’d be overwhelmed with this strange feeling of déjà vu.
What I can say is that since starting BookReview.com in 1996, this is only the second book I’ve read that deserves to be a movie. And the first one was also written by a Brit. Think Mission Impossible meets The Matrix. Throw in Jason Bourne. Maybe mix in a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith for the undercover seductiveness of it . I imagine a bidding war in Hollywood the moment the book hits the right desks.
Not only is this November’s Book of the Month, it has already been chosen as the 2010 Book of the Year. Buy it. Read it. Then tell a friend.  

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