The Other

While everyone wants to "get away from it all" from time to time, John William Barry follows this urge to the extreme, venturing off to live alone as a virtual hermit in the Pacific Northwest wilderness. This superb audio production spares no detail as the mountains and trails roll out before the listener. Mark Bramhall's skilled vocal qualities navigate the shifts in time and characters with quiet confidence. Told from the point of view of Barry's best friend, the more conventional Neil Countryman--husband, father, English teacher--this story inspires thoughts about freedom, friendship and living a fulfilled life. Bramhall's natural-sounding voice is ideal for this exploration of the great outdoors and the complexity of the human mind. L.B.F. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

April 21, 2008
Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars
) runs out of gas mulling the story of two friends who take divergent paths toward lives of meaning. A working-class teenager in 1972 Seattle, Neil Countryman, a “middle of the pack” kind of guy and the book's contemplative narrator, befriends trust fund kid John William Barry—passionate, obsessed with the world's hypocrisies and alarmingly prone to bouts of tears—over a shared love of the outdoors. Guterson nicely draws contrasts between the two as they grow into adulthood: Neil drifts into marriage, house, kids and a job teaching high school English, while John William pulls an Into the Wild
, moving to the remote wilderness of the Olympic Mountains and burrowing into obscure Gnostic philosophy. When John William asks for a favor that will sever his ties to “the hamburger world” forever, loyal Neil has a decision to make. Guterson's prose is calm and pleasing as ever, but applied to Neil's staid personality it produces little dramatic tension. Once the contrasts between the two are set up, the novel has nowhere to go, ultimately floundering in summary and explanation.