Review: Interesting and clever short debut novel
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 2, 2014
The Fracking King, by James Browning, is a debut novel with an interesting mixture of story lines, and a serious message underlining the light hearted and often playful story of a young man, living on his own at a boarding school in the rural countryside of northeastern Pennsylvania, preoccupied with the game of Scrabble.Teenager and boarding school student, main character Winston Crwth (rhymes with 'truth', said, with tongue in cheek, to have derived from the families Welsh origins), grows up as the only son of a divorced couple who met through their shared love of the board game Scrabble. That game became an early focus of his life, with young Winston becoming the recipient of various pranks and hazes throughout his school years, as the family relocates and he tries to fit in at one new school after another. Winston finally arrives at the Hale boarding school in northeastern Pennsylvania, in a community where fracking activities are dominant, bringing money to the landowners as well as concerns of side-effects to the well and ground water supplies in the area.Winston's Hale scholarship has been provided by the Dark Oil and Gas Company, the very company responsible for the drilling and fracking going on throughout the countryside surrounding the school. And as he becomes involved with the concerns of well water pollution caused by the fracking activities, Winston's goal soon becomes one of winning the annual Scrabble Tournament, in order to be given the opportunity to play a symbolic game of Scrabble with the Governor of Pennsylvania, and to use that opportunity to present the Governor with evidence of the effects of the fracking chemicals on the groundwaters of the area.This is a short book (191 pages equivalent) that goes quickly, written in a first-person conversational style, and has some very clever writing in places. There a few laugh out-loud passages, surprisingly funny and unexpected. To some extent, the cleverness used in naming places and characters verges on overdose, but the author has walked a fine line and doesn't go beyond the acceptable. Character development is very limited - beyond the main character, the secondary characters are much less finely drawn and described. For a new novelist, these are perfectly acceptable, and I expect that Browning will improve greatly in these areas with his future efforts.The underlying story of fracking is introduced slowly, with the first part of the book describing Winston's arrival at Hale school, and getting settled in. The focus remains on Scrabble through the second part of the book, as Winston manages to establish a Scrabble club at the school, and then use the club to help begin his preparations for the state Scrabble Tournament. Slowly the impression builds that pollution of the wells and ground water, from the fracking activities, has led to sicknesses in the area, and Winston becomes drawn in to that controversy, finally deciding to use his Scrabble Tournament opportunity to bring evidence to the Governor of the state.The opening scene of the book describes water from a tap catching fire, a visual image that has become familiar to those who are aware of the controversies of fracking (see for example the documentariesFrackNation,Gasland, andGasland Part II). Since the story has clearly been written at least in part to promote an anti-fracking position, some discussion is appropriate regarding how fracking is described in the book. The fracking process itself is not discussed, beyond a brief mention of the noise of the pumping equipment in one or two scenes, and the fracking chemicals and ground water samples are also given a very limited description, even though they are a key part of the story. I feel that this is an aspect of the book that could have been done in a better way - normally, novels which have an underlying subplot that involves some sort of real world technology or environmental issue, work to make that portion of the story factually correct and well described. There is also the point made that some of the people in the story, who are said to have become sick, have intentionally ingested frac chemicals - something that I found very implausible.Author Browning, who, according to the information here on Amazon "writes and speaks on environmental issues for Common Cause", is surely interested in promoting the environmentalists viewpoint of fracking as one of his objectives in writing the book. The book itself says that he is "a spokesman and chief strategist for Common Cause, a government watchdog group". He is also "the coauthor of "Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets"", a series of three reports (the main report covering the U.S. Congress, with supplemental reports covering the states of Michigan, and Pennsylvania) published by Common Cause in November of 2011 and described as "a series of exposes about the political expenditures of the fracking industry". All of those reports are available for free download at the Common Cause website.I enjoyed this book, and it was a pleasant read. I'll be interested to see what author James Browning does decide to do next. If the story sounds interesting to you, then I'd say give it a try. It's a good enough story, and I do think that the opportunity to support a new novelist is worthwhile. I give it 4-stars, probably a slight bit generous, and found it to be an enjoyable and entertaining read and with an underlining message that is serious and timely, if less well developed than it could have been.postscript:A couple of comments to the title and style of the book: First, early reviewers seem to be preoccupied with the term 'fracking', and whether or not the spelling is correct. In fact, hydraulic fracturing, as fracking is more properly known, is the use of pressurized pumping machines to fracture the deep shale formations by pumping highly pressurized water, mixed with chemicals and sand, and is a technology that has been around and utilized in the U.S. oil industry for many decades (having been first tried experimentally in 1947). The commonly used term 'fracking' has been the accepted abbreviation for probably as long as hydraulic fracturing has been in existence. It may not 'look' right, but there it is. I also noticed a clever similarity between the cover design of this book, and the classic Stephen King novelFire-starter- notice not only the cover art but the font style and the prominence of the word 'King' on the cover (compare it to, for example, the cover of the King novelDoctor Sleep). This is nothing more than good marketing, I suppose - someone browsing the 'new releases' section of Amazon or at a brick-and-mortar bookstore might well be attracted to the book thinking it was a new edition of the old Stephen King novel. Just an observation, not a criticism!This book was offered to Amazon Prime members as one of the June "Kindle First" free selections (Prime members are offered a small selection of books that they can select from, receiving one book for free each month). I became aware of this book after receiving the June "Kindle First" e-mail, and 'purchased' it, at zero cost, through that promotion. There is, however, no obligation to post a review as a condition of participating in the Kindle First program, and in any event this review is my honest evaluation of the book and based upon my own reading of it.