By: Max Allan Collins Publisher: William Morrow Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: William Morrow Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 304 Publication Date: December 01, 2004 Release Date: November 23, 2004
Product Description: A New York Times Bestselling Author A Shamus Award-winning Author
The powerful narrative follow-up to the acclaimed graphic novel Road to Perdition
It's 1942, and Michael O'Sullivan is fighting the Japanese with a tommy gun like his father's. He returns home to pick up his old war against the Chicago mob. In a parallel tale set in 1922, Michael O'Sullivan, Sr., chief enforcer for the Irish godfather, is about to become a father. Both men reach a crossroads as two tales converge into the purgatory of good men trapped in bad lives.
Amazon.com Review: It was probably inevitable that the Oscar-winning 2002 movie adaptation of Max Allan Collins's graphic novel Road to Perdition should spawn sequels, and Road to Purgatoryis the first of those--a gams-and-gunplay historical thriller that picks up the action a decade after the original tale left off.
Michael O'Sullivan Jr., the boy who had tagged along with his gangster father on a road-trip mission of vengeance against Al Capone's Chicago mob, only to see his dad murdered, is now in his early 20s. He no longer carries his birth name, but has become Michael Satariano, the adopted son of Sicilian restaurateurs in DeKalb, Illinois, a town not far from the Windy City. It's 1942, and Michael has just returned to the States from a disastrous military campaign in the Philippines that (at the cost of his left eye) won him the first Congressional Medal of Honor awarded during World War II. Changed by the rigors of battle into an impassive killing machine, Michael finds it hard to settle back into his previous life and settle down with high-school girlfriend Patty Ann O'Hara (she of the dimples and Lana Turner figure). So when former "Untouchable" Eliot Ness, now heading a federal office charged with "safeguarding the health and morale of the armed forces," asks him to take on a perilous undercover gig--infiltrating Capone's syndicate in order to curb its criminal enterprises--Michael can't agree fast enough. He blames the ex-Alcatraz inmate for his father's slaying, and sees in this assignment the prospect for retribution. However, as Michael worms his way into the mob, gaining the trust of Capone lieutenant Frank Nitti, winning the heart of celebrity madam Estelle Carey (a woman with her own risky agenda), and planning a deadly assault on Scarface at his Miami estate, Michael discovers that ascribing blame and exacting justice aren't the easy tasks he'd imagined. He also learns that he's more like his late father than he had realized--a point emphasized in a 1922 flashback, which finds Michael O'Sullivan Sr. rescuing Irish gang boss John Looney and protecting Looney's ruthless scion.
Collins's two decades of experience writing about World War II-era Chicago crime, mostly in his Shamus Award-winning Nate Heller detective series ( Angel in Black, Chicago Confidential), shows in Purgatory's copious period atmospherics and its nuanced portrayals of Capone and company. Though the author tests the bounds of plausibility by letting Michael Satariano escape swift punishment for some of the carnage left behind in these pages, he invests this developing family saga with the sort of generational heartache, conflicted loyalties, and pragmatic betrayals that distinguish genuinely suspenseful gangster epics from the merely barbarous rabble. Road to Perdition fans will not be disappointed. Another sequel, Road to Paradise, is in the works, with a graphic novel prequel, Road to Perdition 2: On the Road, already available. --J. Kingston Pierce
Terrific sequel, second in a trilogy Michael Satariano, formerly Michael O'Sullivan, Jr., son of John Looney's "Angel of Death," has become the one-eyed war hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service in Bataan. He is looking to avenge his father's murder by the famous Chicago gangster Al Capone, now released from prison but sequestering himself from all but his most intimate fellows (including acting Outfit boss, Frank Nitti) due to the advanced debilitating effects of syphilis.
To succeed in doing that, Michael will have to infiltrate the highest echelons of the Outfit, using his apparent Sicilian heritage to his benefit (Papa Satariano, his adoptive father, ran a restaurant that was a favorite hangout of Outfit personnel), and with the full knowledge of FBI agent Eliot Ness, who has kept Michael's true identity a secret (and even assisted with his eventual adoption).
Part sequel (Collins considers this a sequel primarily to his Road to Perdition novelization -- the events begin ten years later) and part prequel (four chapters focus on Michael O'Sullivan, Sr.'s, role in a political riot in 1922, his antagonistic relationship with Connor Looney, and the birth of Mike's brother, Peter), Road to Purgatory is, above all, a novel of betrayal. Mike can't seem to keep his word to anyone but himself, not even the too-good-to-be-true hometown girl he left behind when he went to war, and a good deal of the novel's suspense comes from wondering when Frank Nitti, who all but adopts Mike as a surrogate son, will find out the truth. Mike digs himself deeper with each new relationship and things really start to fall apart when someone from his pre-war past resurfaces in the present.
The Chicago gangland of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s is author Max Allan Collins' specialty. Eliot Ness, in particular, has appeared in so many of his novels (specifically this and his Nathan Heller series, as well as his own starring series of novels and other media) that it is almost a surprise when he is absent (like in Collins' Disaster series, like The War of the Worlds Murder, featuring mystery writers as amateur detectives). Luckily, Ness plays a major role in Road to Purgatory (though, with Prohibition over, he's pretty much stuck fighting that other social pariah, venereal disease, giving him yet another connection to Capone).
Collins' characteristic exhaustive research (he even lets us in on the Outfit's "made man" ceremony) adds considerable depth and atmosphere to this not-so-simple revenge tale, the middle story in a saga named after the three parts of Dante's Divine Comedy. He takes the bold step of making Capone and Nitti sympathetic characters and manages to add Nitti's death into the narrative in a way that does not contradict his earlier dramatization of it in his Nathan Heller novel, The Million-Dollar Wound. And the best part is the saga of Michael Satariano is not over yet, and I can't wait to sink my teeth into the final entry of the saga, taking place primarily in the 1970s, Road to Paradise. Fans of the graphic novel of Road to Perdition will also want to seek out the graphic sequel of sorts (really an expansion of the middle), Road to Perdition 2: On the Road.
Good extension of the graphic novel Now here's a curious book -- it's a novel written as a sequel to a graphic novel, Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner's 1998 work Road to Perdition (which was made into the movie starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman). Ten years after the events of the first book Michael O'Sullivan Jr. comes home from World War II with the fame of being a war hero -- fame that Eliot Ness hopes to channel into a last-ditch effort to bring down the Capone mob in Chicago once and for all.
Having read both the original graphic novel and Collins' own novelization of the film, I feel like I know these characters quite well at this point. Collins has a real talent for blending real historical figures like Frank Nitti and John Looney into a fictional tapestry that seems like it very well could be real. People who read the original graphic novel will feel for Mike, feel even for Mike Sr., as his son spirals down the same terrible road that consumed his own life.
The writing is crisp and the characters are strong, but even at a brief 288 pages, Collins tends to wander about a bit. There's an extended flashback sequence to an adventure of Mike Sr. that really doesn't serve any purpose in advancing the plot. Apparently the point is to accentuate how much Mike Jr. is becoming like his father, but you don't really need it. It's a good story in its own right, but it doesn't have any impact on the events of the novel as a whole except to accentuate that Mike Sr. never wanted his son to follow in his path, which is something anyone who read the original (or saw the movie) already knew.
Still, it's a strong novel and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Now to find the last book in the trilogy, Road to Paradise.
Fast Paced Excitement Collins at the top of his form with this terrific sequel to "Perdition." A real page-turner, the author has broken the book into three parts which work seamlessly while leaving the reader dangling in suspense. Using historical figures in the novel make the book just all that more more engrossing. Top notch characterization, ambience, and dialogue, the book is cleverly comprised and not over-long...just right to keep the pulse pounding and the pages flying!
Ness, Capone, and Nitti plus: Reader review for:
Road to Purgatory By Max Allan Collins
In our history lessons, we have learned about World War II, but never in the connection between that infamous war and gangster activities. Al Capone, Frank Nitti, and their underlings, had deep-rooted control of so many factors during that war and after. These gangsters wanted, and generally did, control many factors in our nation. Their control led to much killing, most of it very secretive.
Max Allan Collins gives us a perspective of all of the above. He takes us deep into the mob and the many, along with their underlings, that controlled the mob. A hero of Bataan from the early years of the war, Corporal Michael Satariano became involved in the mobs when he had returned home because of an accident while he was active on Bataan. He actually started working for Elliot Ness, another well-known name on the FBI side of the law.
The activities of Michael, once he became entangled with the mob while working as an insider for the FBI, and attempting to right a wrong done to his father, will turn your minds upside down and get a terrific feel of what times were like during this period of our nations history. You will not want to put this book down.
Review written by Cy Hilterman
January 17, 2006
cyhilterman@digitalrazor.net
A fascinating well-researched portrayal of 1940s mafia life Michael O'Sullivan has been living these past years under another name: Michael Satariano. Adopted from the orphanage that Eliot Ness managed to get him placed into after the murder of his father, Michael grew up trying to put the past behind him. He went off to serve his county in the Second World War, only to find that the skills he learned while on the road with his father, such as his ability to kill when it has to be done, have been awakened and built upon. He fights valiantly, losing an eye but gaining a Medal of Honor (he's the first to win one in the war) and a ticket off Bataan. He still wants to serve --- he can fire a gun, even with one eye missing --- but Uncle Sam seems to have other ideas.
At first he obediently goes along with the plans, but his insistence about speaking out against the government pulling out of Bataan, leaving his fellow fighters behind, loses him his active status. Ness, calling him in, offers to get it back, if he goes undercover. The Capone organization has changed since Al went to jail. They've made mistakes, and Frank Nitti, the boss in Al's place who is still supposedly taking orders from the man who now lives in Florida, might be ripe for the fall. Michael is eager to join. His own father went to Capone for help in his vendetta against the men responsible for the death of his wife and Michael's little brother, but instead Capone ordered his death. When he gets next to Nitti, he finds that he might be the lesser of two evils; the man set to take over is a much harder, greedier person. Soon he's trying to figure out where his loyalties lie and how he can stay true to himself while being drawn deeper and deeper into a life that you only leave feet first.
We do have a break in the story to revisit Michael, Sr. This would be an interesting short story in itself, but it has some parallels to the main story that serve to underline what his son is going through. Like Michael, Jr., Michael, Sr. works for a man who treats him like a son. Unlike his own son, he joined because he was desperate to make a good life, and the deeper he gets into the organization, the better the life he has. In both stories, Collins makes a point of saying that individuals such as Capone and John Looney seemed like good people, just giving the working man a chance to have a drink. They also gave immigrants --- Irish, in Looney's case --- an opportunity to succeed in the new world, a place that can be very unforgiving. Both Nitti and Looney treat the O'Sullivans very well and are rewarded --- though tempered, in Michael, Jr.'s case --- with loyalty. As in the main story, we also see that there are people involved who do not dance in the gray area; they undoubtedly are bad people who use their position to gratify their worst desires.
THE ROAD TO PURGATORY mixes the excitement of 1940s mafia life with realism. There are stretches where Michael doesn't have to do anything, and his life is fairly normal. Though we don't experience these moments much, they do act as a lull for Michael, making it easy for him to ignore the reality of where he is. But when the time comes for him to fight, he doesn't hesitate. He is, genuinely, a good man. He avoids the woman he loves, his high school sweetheart, because he doesn't want to involve her in his world, but he does treat well the lady who he takes up with. He is, for the most part, honorable; he's not perfect --- far from it --- but like his father, he has decency at his core. And this book illustrates how a good person can find himself on a road that he simply cannot pull off of.
Fascinating and well-researched, THE ROAD TO PURGATORY gives a true feel for the time while making readers wonder what they would do in the two situations presented here. The answers are not easy.
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