I'll Take Exclusion For $200

...when it comes to the fiction novel, I fully admit that there are times when I take longer than necessary to finish. When I read Richard Matheson's horror masterwork I Am Legend, I whipped through the entire thing in mere days. It sounds like a lot of time considering the length, but I managed this in between twelve-plus hour work days so essentially, I was thinking about Robert Neville when I could not be home to read about him. But then there are novels a la Albert Camus' unfinished manuscript The First Man where it was a struggle just to mow down one more chapter.

When I read any book, I enjoy it best when I can picture the events in my head. When a film develops in the gray matter with no effort, I can run through page after page without stopping. As I have gotten more interested in reading the classics that I have missed in recent years, I find a similar experience dependent on each individual story. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a fast read because I simply did not want to stop reading. The narrative morphed into a mind film with finely detailed edges. It was not that I felt the need to finish, but rather the want. I needed to know how things progressed and ended.

Ask anyone who knows me who my go-to fiction character is and almost all of them will tell you that it is Batman. From comics to film to novels, I have to know it all. His is a world that I want to know every crevice of until I can recite them all from memory. To date, I have read a good amount of comics and novels set in Gotham City and I can still rattle off numerous that I have yet to read. My ultimate dream is to one day have the largest library of The Dark Knight on Earth. Not likely to occur, but a man can dream.

So, given the awe-inspiring to the mediocre Batman comics and novels that I have found something worth enjoying in, why can I not enjoy No Man's Land? It is obvious from any online reading to mere viewing that The Dark Knight Rises was heavily inspired by this series and novel. I maintain that I think Rises to be the best of the film trilogy. However, I had been somewhere in the 430 pages of Greg Rucka's novel since this time last fall, only to finally give up and skip to the last few pages last night to be done with it.

It was literally last September that I dove into the Batman novel I had been holding on to for a good amount of time. With it's near-mint dust jacket and thickness, I was preparing to embark on an epic tale in the Gotham universe. I had read and loved multiple Batman novels that seem to be met with a generally "meh" from most other readers. I had even enjoyed the Gotham Knight tie-in paperback that came with the anime feature released before The Dark Knight hit theaters.

If one looked at Amazon or Goodreads, one would think No Man's Land to be the ultimate prose novel in the Batman canon. But after 12 months of starts, re-starts, groans, moans and thoughts of just quitting before plowing through the bulk of it, I finally caved after reaching 375 pages of the story. Why? Because the book is bad. Very bad. It is boring to the point of feeling like it should be instructions on how to program a microwave.

OK...I am exaggerating. Any Batman story will have its moments and yes, this one has a few. A few. Out of 430 pages, there are a handful of chapters that were at least entertaining. These rare moments are wrapped in thick layers of too many characters, too many plots that drag, too many pointless moments of needless exposition and most importantly....too many pages where Batman is nowhere to be found.

Flesh all of this out with a framework that feels like a lifeless Tom Clancy spy novel and I am still amazed that a Batman novel could bore me to tears in the manner that No Man's Land did. Greg Rucka is celebrated amongst readers of comics and prose as being a master of noir and the spy genre, but I just don't see it. When I hear him on a podcast, I keep thinking that he should be one of my favorite authors on Earth. Then I return to read Lazarus or, in this instance, No Man's Land and I find myself sagging, feeling either angry or as I am being excluded from something that others clearly understand.

So, the ending? Truthfully, it was fine enough. I skipped 30-plus pages just to arrive there and what I missed doesn't seem important to me. I have it in my head that it was merely a wealth of unnecessary buildup to what I now already know. I did not think that there would be a day where I would find a Batman story that I truly did not like. First time for everything, I suppose...