The Sculptor

The Sculptor
by Gregory Funaro

The Sculptor is an awkward novel about a serial killer obsessed with the work of Michelangelo.

I didn’t care for it.

Yes, this book was annoying. You see, when a narrative uses certain tropes over and over, I sometimes feel like it deserves to be mocked. Yes, Mockery, as you know, is the practice of derision or ridicule and comes from the old French mocquer. Thus, while reading this book, you see, I got the feeling that it was the sort of book that, yes, deserved mockery. So it was that the book was destined to be mocked and that I, yes, was destined, you see, to mock it.

Anyway. The psycho featured in the novel is Christian Bach, who was raised in an incestuous relationship with his abusive mother, which led to his obsession with sculpture and Michelangelo’s Pieta. Also serial killing, because that's what happens to all victims of abuse, no matter what. The connection between these things and Dr. Hildebrant’s book was, to be honest, lost on me. Nevertheless, Dr. Hildebrant somehow intuits Bach's incestuous feelings with complete accuracy. This stunning (almost miraculous) feat of empathy was one of many things that left me unimpressed.

Bach is a cliche. He is extraordinarily muscular, cultured, independently wealthy, and is a polymath in art, chemistry, medicine and anatomy. He has an enormous lair that conceals all his nefarious activities and consistently outwits the police and the FBI. Basically he’s a Batman villain, complete with Capitalized Villain Name and themed crimes.

So close . . .

I found almost every aspect of his character to be either a general cliche or an idea taken from another source. It reads like a blatant attempt to capitalize on the popularity of other works - a fusion of Hannibal Lecter with the Da Vinci Code.

Toward the end of the novel, when Bach’s back story is finally revealed to the reader, we learn that he was sexually and physically abused by his mother and that they saw a sculpture of the Pieta in their church and decided they liked it. At best, this explained a fascination with that particular sculpture, but there was no real effort to explain the connection between this dysfunction and sculpture in general, aside from one instance of playing with play doh as a child. There was likewise no rationale for how any of that inspired him to use actual dead bodies for the sculptures instead of, say, wood. Or plaster of paris. Or marble. Or literally anything else.

Nobody had to die.

The other characters were similar in their striking resemblance to other figures from fiction. I stopped keeping track of the parallels between Dr. Hildebrant and Dr. Langdon after only a few chapters. I couldn’t quite decide which of the various ace FBI profiler characters Sam was meant to resemble (personally I think he was a watered-down Agent Pendergast, but that may just be because I’m a fan) - he may as well have been all of them. Both characters were flat and broadly uninteresting. Agent Markham’s back story was at almost complete odds with his actual behavior toward Cathy (I will never love again and will dedicate myself to avenging my wife . . . until I meet an attractive woman), and hers consisted exclusively of “recently divorced.” There wasn’t much there to make me want to keep reading, and their inevitable happy ending undermined both his drive to avenge his previous wife and her new-found independence from her cheating husband.

In closing, I will repeat that I didn't care for this book. Usually in these posts I try to balance my negative thoughts with positives, but in this case I couldn't find much I liked. Your mileage may vary.