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Title: Death Wish
Series: ----------
Author: Brian Garfield
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Psychological Fiction
Pages: 192
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

Paul Benjamin is a successful accountant in New York City. One afternoon his wife and married daughter are attacked in Paul's apartment and savagely beaten. His wife dies and his daughter ends up in a sanitarium, insane for all intents and purposes.

Paul has always been a good guy. He's done charity work for prison reform, contributes to causes left and right and thinks that if he obeys the rules that Society will protect him. With the attack on his family this delusion is ripped away and Paul must confront what living in a big city really means.

As he mulls these thoughts over, he begins to change. He realizes he has been afraid and he is now going to stop being afraid. But how does one stop being afraid? By taking responsibility for ones self is the conclusion Paul comes to.

On a business trip to the Mid-West Paul has a one night stand with some stranger at his hotel. When she leaves he realizes how empty his life is. How empty those hoodlums have made his life. He buys a small calibre pistol at a fishing shop and takes it back to New York with him hidden in his carry on baggage.

Paul begins roaming the city at night, exposing himself to danger so as to kill the perpetrators of violence and crime. After several kills the papers pick up on the fact that there is a vigilante on the loose. The book ends with Paul having just shot 4 teenagers who were throwing 50lb rocks onto a train to kill people inside and a cop seeing him. The cop raises his hat and deliberately turns his back and Paul walks home.

My Thoughts:

My goodness, another fantastic book for this year. Definitely gets the “Best Book of the Year” tag.

So, this review might be long and rambly, please bear with me or just skip it. Either way, it's all good.

I had heard about this through the 1974 film starring Charles Bronson. Knowing the type of movie Bronson usually starred in, I never got around to watching it. Then in 2018 a remake with Bruce Willis was made and it eventually came to Amazon Prime. I watched the reboot, as I really like Willis. That led me to watching the original with Bronson and then to hunting down the book. I plan on talking about the movies in a Versus post later this month. Death Wish vs Death Wish vs Death Wish!

Based on the synopsis and the movies, I was expecting a book about a vigilante getting his revenge. A soft, pasty, weakminded fool seeing reality for the first time in his life and going all gung-ho to the other extreme. What I got was a psychological book that impressed me over and over and over. Paul never finds the hoodlums who killed his wife and he never expects to. What I read was the mind of a man pushed beyond its self-imposed limits. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't always easy to read about but it was good.

I've always considered Crime & Punishment to be THE book on what a criminal mind goes through after a murder. Death Wish is entering the same territory in my mind but from the other end. What does a man go through when he truly realizes how broken, destructive and unsafe his world is? This book shows the answer to that.

Given the fact that I already agree with most of the statements made in this book (see my Quote post from the other day) it is no surprise that I liked this. The only part I struggled with was Paul taking the role of Executioner into his own hands, not lightly, but so determinedly. I believe that every human has the God given right to defend themselves. I believe that laws like the Stand Your Ground laws are essential to a free society. However, when defense of Self moves into the defense of Society then I cannot blindly accept or promote it. But neither do I blindly negate it. Evil, and people who commit acts of Evil ARE evil, must be resisted not only by the dutifully elected officials of Law and Order but by every conscientious citizen as well. The flip side of the Right to Self-defense is the Responsibility of Self-defense. This book was written in 1972 and is pretty dated but the battle that Paul goes through in his mind is as relevant today as it was then.

I don't know what someone who is in staunch opposition to the right of self-defense would make of this book. I don't think it would change their mind. It is not meant to however. This was a book written to all of those people who sit on the fence and think they are safe because “of the police” or that “it couldn't happen here in Safe Safe Happy Funland.” Brian Garfield also NEVER ridicules those who think like Paul at the beginning of the book. I really appreciated that.

I would love to unreservedly recommend this book but honestly, I can't. For me, it was the right book at the right time. People can have their minds changed and responsibility can grow from even the stinkiest compost heap.

To end, this was not an action/adventure novel of revenge and over the top violence. This was the story of a man finally growing up.

★★★★★ ( )

Writing is poor, full of telling instead of showing, non-sequiturs, bad dialogue, casual racism and misogyny. The chief introspection literally comes when Paul reads an interview of a forensic psychologist while hogging the John at a party. There's no suspense. I will say the ending is more chilling than the Bronson film. ( )

Well-known novel (made into a movie) about a conventional liberal lawyer whose wife is killed and daughter becomes mentally disabled after being beaten by muggers He eventually buys a pistol and begins shooting minor street criminals; at the end of the book, despite a close call, he is still doing it. The novel is told from his viewpoint (though not first person), so his motives are sympathetically explored, but it is not clear whether the writer intends the reader to agree with his decision. ( )

"There are times I’m convinced there’s nothing more to existence in this world than a black desert where blind people pick up rocks and grope around to kill one another.”

There's a reason why Garfield's novel of vigilante justice resonated so well with both the reading a film-going population of the seventies. The economic and sociopolitical struggles of that decade was woven deep into the very cultural existence at the time. Death Wish - with its lingering look at the emotional deterioration of the survivor of inner-city gang violence that eventually leads to violent assaults in a desperate attempt to achieve some sort of societal (if not cosmic) justice - managed to appeal not only to a segment of the population that wished to retaliate against increasing crime and disharmony with bloody retribution, but also to those who feared this kind of romanticized barbarism.

Garfield achieves this dual status by allowing the reader to remain empathetic to the plight of Paul Benjamin after his wife and daughter are attacked (and the wife killed) by drug addicted street thugs, but doesn't manufacture exterior excuses or rationalizations for his increasingly misanthropic worldview and behavior, enabling one to understand without condoning, or conversely, to cheer on Benjamin without losing sight of the disconnect with humanity caused by his actions. In other hands, Death Wish would be just another men's adventure novel (exactly what the film franchise became, ironically), but instead it is a journey into the depths of human desperation, obsession, and ultimately, personal retribution.

"We are all dressing for dinner in the jungle." ( )

The book that inspired the film, this is a slim, thoughtful meditation on grief and loss and anger that leads to violence as the only rational response to a dangerous world. Whether it's a moral response is left ambiguous. This isn't sleazy or exploitative or even sanctimonious. Mostly it's just sad story about a man transformed into his opposite by a horrible loss. ( )