Book Review (Canon): Kane and Abel

Kane and Abel

Written by Jeffrey Archer in 1979

The Raccoon: Kane and Abel traces the entire lives of William Kane, the son of a wealthy banker, and Abel Rosnovski, an impoverished Polish refugee. Their stories intertwine and lead to the two men developing a bitter rivalry as they struggle to build corporate empires in 20th century America.

UNMASKED: My favorite genre, if it can be called that, is a contest between two minds; for example, Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, Light and L (Death Note), Walter White and Gustavo Fring (Breaking Bad), and Batman and the Joker.  Consequently, when William and Abel each exhibited remarkable cleverness and an ability to understand and control their environment from a young age, I fell in love with the novel.

While Archer catalogs his characters’ various academic achievements, they serve to explain the characters’ mindsets and goals rather than prove their intelligence. The reader discovers that William and Abel are gifted through their actions.  Moreover, the two men are equal only in their intelligence, and I was captivated watching them use a completely different set of tools and alliances to rise to comparable levels of power.  

Thankfully, there is more to Kane and Abel than just, well, Kane and Abel.  Archer skillfully shows other characters’ reactions to the titular men’s larger than life personalities and how they maneuver around and work with these giants, similar to the “Sherlock Holmes” stories’ Watson and Ender’s Game’s Valentine.

Kane and Abel is a tour de force that will challenge your manliness or the manliness of your closest man.  It is no less than the story of the American dream and the consequences, both positive and negative, of determination.

Strengths:

• The two main characters are ingenious, making their adventures shocking and fun to read.
• The substitution of a concrete villain for two misguided heroes who saw each other as the villain kept every chapter exciting and inspiring.
• While certain parallels between William and Abel’s lives are necessary and welcome to carry the novel, the protagonists’ stories operate in unique spheres with distinct cultures, relationships, and trials.

Weaknesses:

• One character’s grievance against the other seems underwhelming for the extremity of his following hatred.  While I came to understand the rationale by the end of the novel, it greatly disappointed me at the time.
• Similarly, an arc with a “Romeo and Juliet” flavor felt unnecessary and theatrical.

Rating: 19/20 hotels

Ideal Setting: Read this when a political event makes you lose faith in the American dream.  Archer proves that dedication and intelligence can carry you further than inherited wealth, so long as you do try to take revenge on someone who is not even entirely responsible for the act that angered you.