The Hour I First Believed : Wally Lamb

                                          Image Credit : Madison Public Library
It's a Sunday morning, and I just spent Saturday night finishing Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed. Based in large part on the Columbine high school massacre, the book offers a vivid look into the immediate aftermath of the Columbine tragedy, and the spiraling consequences that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold set into motion that fateful April day years ago.

Caelum Quirk is not your typical narrator. He has no heroic traits about him, in fact, at times you find yourself intensely disliking him. But that is what makes him human. Caelum's faults were the kind that I could identify with. Two failed marriages, and a third failing one. (Err, not that I have had two failed marriages, but well, you get the idea). A high school teacher with little or promise for the future. A could-have-been-writer whose book never gets published. And then his wife, Maureen, gets caught in the school library on the day that Eric and Dylan let loose their violence, and though she survives, she will never be the same again. Lamb tackles several themes here - one favorite one of his is chaos theory. The idea that something somewhere can set in motion a chain of events that can completely alter your life. A butterfly may flap its wings in South Africa, and somehow that small motion can trickle down to a catastrophic impact on your life in Sri Lanka.

The book is a work of fiction, but Lamb does not meddle around much with the Columbine facts - Eric and Dylan as well those killed in that massacre are presented as they were. Maureen Quirk's disintegration was superbly handled by Lamb, I thought, although I was a bit disappointed by the redemption offered to her in the end. The one character I liked the most was Velvet Hoon - a difficult and troubled teen at school, she develops an attachment to Maureen, calls her Mom, and somehow despite Caelum's desperate attempts to shun her, I found myself drawn more to her. It's a pity that we mostly get to know about Velvet through Caelum for here was a character who really was intriguing. All this reads very well, and I was finding the pace of the book riveting. Till I came towards the latter half - Caelum returns to his family farmhouse, abandoning his job in Columbine, and what follows is a long, tedious narrative into his family history, especially letters written by his great grandmother as she tried to build a more humane prison system in the late 19th century.

From here on, we sort of descend into the bizarre - old family skeletons are unearthed, literally. Two of them are found in a suitcase hidden in an attic. One of them is a mummified baby. And frankly, I wasn't sure what it all was meant to convey. Why spoil a book that till then was superb in its psychological portrayal of two troubled characters? Prison reform? Yeah, Columbine massacres and prison reforms may seem like they go together, but it just offered a historical twist, nothing more. This criticism though does not make the book unreadable. Rather, The Hour I First Believed is a pacy read. Gripping. Taut. Loose in parts towards the end. But worth it just the same.

Verdict : Hmm, I would recommend the book, but with a disclaimer that Great-Grandma Lizzie is a bit boring. 


Rating : 3/5