Pharoni

by Colin Dodds

When the body of Harry Injurides - playwright, provocateur and bodybuilder - washes up on a beach, his friends are shocked, but not altogether surprised. But when they meet to mourn Harry, he shows up and says he's been resurrected.

Pharoni is the story of those friends. Tommy Pharoni tries to overcome his shock by writing about his friend's resurrection, and accidentally starts a religion. Roy Sudden starts a tech empire based on digital empathy and digital pain, drawing in billionaire investors, femme-fatale programmers, and tsunamis of capital. And, Roy's on-again, off-again girlfriend Maud works in secret to bring radical justice to the most neglected and abused corners of society.

As Tommy's religion grows, Roy and his backers try to take control of it. The battle, about more than doctrine, engulfs Tommy's marriage and threatens his life, leading to a conflict with strangely humane results that no one could predict.

Unknown Binding

About the author

Colin Dodds is an award-winning author and filmmaker, whose works include Pharoni, Ms. Never and The 6th Finger of Tommy the Goose. He grew up in Massachusetts and lived in California briefly, before finishing his education in New York City. Since then, he’s made his living as a journalist, editor, copywriter and video producer. His work has appeared in Gothamist, The Washington Post and more than three hundred other publications, and been praised by luminaries such as David Berman and Norman Mailer. Forget This Good Thing I Just Said, a first-of-its-kind literary and philosophical experience (the book form of which was a finalist for the Big Other Book Prize for Nonfiction), is available as an app for the iPhone. He lives in New York City, with his wife and children.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Told in the first person, Pharoni has the feel of a memoir or a really long confession. Tommy Pharoni is a struggling screenplay writer who pays his bills and alimony by working a soulless marketing job. His closest friends were aspiring artists of different sorts in college. Now in their mid-thirties, they've set aside those aspirations to "adult" properly. All except for Harry, whose death opens the story. Harry struggled to fit into contemporary society, instead preferring to help the homeless while penning "words of wisdom" in his many notebooks. After his death and subsequent re-birth, those notebooks wound up in Tommy's possession. Ultimately, Tommy would collect them into a coherent manuscript and seek out a way to get them published.

As Tommy is a screenwriter, the format of the story periodically shifts into screenplay mode. This works particularly well for conversations as it affords opportunity to get to know the other characters through their dialogue rather than relying on Tommy's narrative. I wouldn't say Tommy is an unreliable narrator, but he does limit what we can learn about what's going on elsewhere with other characters. References to things that have been written elsewhere and NDAs force the reader to fill in the gaps.

After Harry's resurrection, the lives of Tommy and his friends change as described in the blurb, but there's so much more. The group of friends find themselves splattered by the seven deadly sins, fitting for a story where a religion is founded upon the philosophical musings of a character that has died and miraculously resurrected days later. At least Christianity didn't get partnered with a health and wellness brand. The corrupting influence of millions and billions of dollars seeps its way into their lives and rots them from within. What is friendship worth? Can you put a dollar amount on it?

If there's one overarching theme that I can take away from this tale, it's that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Keeping this spoiler free, I'll say that Tommy started out as a character that I could connect with to someone I didn't want anything to do with. But I stuck with him because act two opens with:

This is where I get unrelatable, maybe even unlikable. As the writer of failed screenplays, I know what a mortal sin unlikability can be.

That gave me hope for him in act three. But Tommy is far from the only person to be corrupted by power. It's everyone up to the very end of the story. And the only characters whose souls are left intact are those who never possess it.

Colin Dodds has crafted an excellent morality play with vivid characters. Pharoni offers modern day parallels to the founding of Christianity, right down to the Christmas star, but in an age of unbridled capitalism. If you're old enough, with all of the life experience that implies, it forces you to take a look at this fellowship of friends and how they sacrificed art and friendship for wealth and power and check to make sure that this isn't a mirror of your own life.

[Scuffed Granny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, for me, was a curious read. It made me think on many levels and I am hoping that this is what Colin Dodds had in mind when he wrote it.

Told in the first person, our narrator is Tommy Pharoni who relates to us the development of his life, which is deeply influenced, even manufactured, by the death of his friend, Harry. Actually, it is more Harry's reappearance in the land of the living which is the catalyst for the alteration to Tommy's previously quite staid and humble existence into one where he has status and influence, although he learns that this can be a fragile thing.

The novel begins with a group of friends losing one of their number, the aforementioned Harry to what appears to be suicide. Many questions are raised as to why Harry may have left this world, when he is suddenly spotted in the flesh, so to speak, and this prompts even more enquiry and debate.

The friendship group consists of Harry and Tommy as mentioned and Andrew, his sister Maud, Roy and Theo. All seem to be surviving rather than thriving except for Maud, who has a career in insurance but Harry's death and the furore that develops around it propels them all into territories unknown. Their lives then become influenced by external pressures and expectations that threaten to tear them apart as friends as well as creating fractures in their own individual existences.

Dodds chooses to have a lot of his dialogue written as a play with stage directions; as Tommy is an aspiring screenwriter, this is apt as well as adding something to the whole feel of the book as something unconventional, mirroring the fact that it deals in ideas that are at times philosophical and at others, disturbing to contemplate.

This book is not challenging to read as Dodds' prose is a delight. There were certain sentences that I mulled over, like a good wine, repeating them in my head for what they conjured and how they had been crafted. However, it is challenging in the ideas that it proposes about religion and its possible exploitation, and greed and control.

Pharoni is not a bleak book - Tommy's narration helps this - but it is certainly not an uplifting read. Thought-provoking and intelligent and one to contemplate on when finished.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Kat M · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a really well done science fiction novel, it was a beautifully done plot and I was hooked from the first page.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Diana Kathryn Penn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a strange, and at times, mildly interesting story about the complications of friendships and how they mingle with business... what motivates people to make choices, and the payoff, or lack of it, that brings on regret and often apathy.

I listened to this story in audio book format. The story, told partly as a narrative, with an almost memoir feel, interspersed with the technical aspects of a screenplay, mingled back and forth without, I felt, a cohesive plot-line. I found it difficult to separate the sections of personal viewpoint with the "fly on the wall" distance required for a screenplay. Shifting from what felt like a story to what felt like stage directions and prescribed dialogue, was a bit like juggling; I'm not very good at juggling. I think that if I'd read the book in print, perhaps I would have understood the story's flow better. Sometimes, seeing it on the page rather than hearing it aloud, makes this style easier to understand.

I found the themes of mixing friends with business, and the pitfalls of that choice, mixed with the concept of what it means to start a religion, led by the resurrection of a dead friend who's resurrection isn't ever actually verified, a difficult set of plates to keep spinning in my head. Perhaps I would have found it easier to digest if i didn't have to shift from narrative to stage direction so often.

However, Burt Bonnem's voice acting performance was tremendous. I enjoyed the cadence of his voice and the delivery of built-in skepticism as the story progressed. I felt a little like even he didn't believe the story he was reading. Still, his performance was strong enough that I will seek out other books that he has narrated.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the author, Colin Dodds. This book felt more like work than entertainment, and I felt that it was also left unfinished in many aspects. Perhaps, if another title he writes catches my eye, I might try him again. But not for a while. This story has left me hesitant to work so hard for what I felt was too little reward.