Chessville - Reviews - The Miniature Man - by R. Muir

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The Miniature Man
Reviewed by David Surratt

By R. Muir

Snowbooks, 2005

softcover, 329 pages

ISBN 0954575946

From the Prologue:

The cicadas screamed. Their shrill, interminable cry gnawed into the girl's brain like acid. She lay on her side, her knees drawn up toward her chest against the pain. Her flesh was torn and raw and now unpityingly scorched on that side exposed to the caustic desert sun. But though her body sweltered, and the stones beneath it stabbed like broken glass, she could not move.

"Don't hurt me anymore." "Don't hurt me anymore." The phrase droned over and over in her mind as if the tape across her mouth had locked it in. "Don't hurt me anymore;" its rhythm strangely mimicked by the flashing red/blue lights that suddenly appeared as if to mock her helplessness with alternating stares.

'Oh, my good God!'

'Is she alive?'

'Barely. Get a blanket from the car, will ya? And call the Rescue Unit.'

While the one officer hurried back, the other tried to shield the girl from the midday sun.

'Don't worry, honey. You're gonna be okay.'

He had to force back the rage and nausea that swept over him...

First efforts are normally learning experiences for novice writers, but don't expect to find anything lacking in this first novel from R. Muir. The Miniature Man is an extraordinary work that captures you from the very first page, and holds your attention throughout. About "r. muir" I have been unable to learn anything, other than he/she has written at least one other book since.

The Miniature Man is a psychological mystery-thriller that delves deep into the hidden, dark corners of the human psyche, into the depths of the human mind, to where we go to hide when the world outside is no longer bearable. Marcy, or so she is called by the nuns who care for her, bears no memory of the time before St Francis, the convent cum hospital that had become her home. Yet there she finds herself, "...approximately fourteen years old, 5 feet 2 inches tall, brown eyes and brows, left-handed." In her journal Marcy writes, "It's real odd. I mean to be grown up, or almost grown up, and not be able to remember how you got that way." But Marcy is not alone. Let me introduce the story's other main characters...

Julian was a prodigy, in the truest sense of the word. At the age of twelve he collected his first GM scalp; many others were to follow. That Julian's was a true chess genius seems confirmed by his record against top-ranked players, 11-0. That he was a fitting companion for some of chessdom's most famous eccentrics was also confirmed, both by his appearance...

He wore white; he was white: white sneakers, socks, pants, suspenders, long-sleeve shirt and tie, white hair, white skin - a pasty shade of corpselike pallor. In fact his skin color seemed to have no depth, but lay on the surface like an opaque mask: anemic, static, inhumanly expressionless. It was easier to keep one's face averted, for if one did brave a surreptitious glance, it was apprehended, caught and swallowed up by the case-hardened blue-black lenses that enshrouded the chess player's eyes. Invariably they drew focus - like twin black holes.

...and by his attitude: "With a self-assured arrogance reminiscent of Paul Morphy, he issued an open challenge to any Grandmaster who was willing to meet him on his home ground." Unrated exhibitions, the games were nevertheless scrutinized closely in clubs across the country, and were "replete with unique positions and radical lines of play."

An epileptic seizure at the critical moment of facing down yet another Grandmaster (over a Sicilian Defense) apparently ends his enigmatic chess career. Julian, too, winds up a patient in the same convent / sanitarium that now houses a small, broken girl.

Sister Zoë is the Mother Superior, the leader of the convent, half of whose Sisters were highly trained psychologists. The "cluster of stuccoed buildings tucked away in the mountainous wilds of Northern Arizona, St Francis of the Mogollon Rim" was also home to Sister Dana, a young, enthusiastic Nun, still struggling to come to grips with her own feelings. She had been assigned the task of caring for Marcy, of companioning her.

The Miniature Man is cerebral enough, yet engagingly accessible. The characters are well developed and believable. Though it incorporates chess, the story-telling doesn't require the reader to know how to play. The psychology is presented without getting mired in psycho-babble, or allowing it to become the entire focus of the book. Muir does a good job of pacing the story, and choosing just the right moments to segue from scene to scene. One chess complaint I have is that the diagrams (and yes - there are a few, though the game is really irrelevant to the story) have reversed the conventional usage of the king and queen symbols, so that the coronet-type crown is used for the king, and the crown with the cross used for the queen.

The Miniature Man is definitely Rated R for adult themes, including kidnapping, rape, torture and attempted murder. Yet Muir manages to handle this essential part of the plot in a straightforward way that doesn't distract from the story, and without sensationalizing it, while avoiding minimizing or trivializing the horrible reality of what occurred to Marcy. The Miniature Man will entertain you in an intense sort of way; a real page-turner of a storyteller this Muir!

I'll leave you with this excerpt, from an encounter between Julian and Sister Zoë, which sets the stage for the whole story (and please don't write me about the diagram, I already told you the kings & queens were switched!):

'Good morning, Mr. Papp.'

"Ms. Zoë.'

'How good of you to come.'

'More so than any other morning?' He downed the pills. 'Just came for my fix.'

'And is the medication working?'

'Some. No fits, at least.'

'Any side effects?'

'Still want to puke at times, but I can stand it.'

'Sleeping?'

'No. That all?'

'Oh, please, sit down.'

He did.

'You have that Father Confessor look, Ms. Zoë. I warn you, it's been seven years since my last confession. How's your stamina?'

'I merely want to ask you how your chess class went with Marcy. Did you find her a competent student?'

'Too soon to tell. She's quick enough. Retention is the question.'

'I don't think she'll disappoint you there.'

'Good memory?'

'For the most part, yes.'

'But not always.'

'No. She does forget sometimes.'

'Memory is a funny mechanism - "fickle". For instance, Marcy asked me yesterday about a chess term she'd heard somewhere. She had no idea what it meant. But it jogged my memory so much I've been up half the night.'

'I don't think I...'

'No, you couldn't; I'll explain. It concerned a famous championship. After Marcy left I reconstructed one of its best-known games, and before I knew what happened I'd played all twenty. Odd, isn't it, how the tiniest fragment will reactivate whole episodes? How's your memory Ms. Zoë?'

'Sometimes I think more feeble than fickle, certainly compared to one like yours. Do you remember everything, or just those things in which you're interested?'

'It's all accessible. You'd be surprised what I can pull, even from the cradle. Very Oedipal. I shouldn't say "all," though. There are a few impressions that "lurk un-retrieved." It's like they're waiting for me to find some novel means of understanding, as if they're so removed from my immediate experience that nothing I ordinarily envision describes them. I think forgetting certain dreams is a similar phenomenon. If something totally unfamiliar happens in our sleep, something that defies associations, chances are we'll lose it once awake - the result of being programmed by a literal reality.'

'You've apparently thought about this a great deal.'

'Of course. When your mind is the repository for every piddling bit of information, it's natural to wonder how and why. Are you familiar with categorization?'

'If you mean the mind's ability to store and classify things, yes.'

'I guess that's apt. In some of my exhibitions I play as many as ten games simultaneously. Each one merely occupies its own niche in my head. I just skip from board to board, making the respective moves. It's a terrific stunt. Tends to mystify the uninitiated. But actually, it's no big deal. Everybody can do it to some extent. Marcy, for example.'

'Oh?'

'You said she forgets selectively.'

'Did I?'

'Her mind obviously is categorizing. Anything she chooses not to remember, she stores in a special niche - the one with the gatekeeper.'