By Pam Walatka

“The Wave” (Warner, 2006) by Walter Mosley is a bad book by a good writer. Mosley writes with lyrical grace and is loved by readers and critics. He has written tremendously successful detective novels (the Easy Rawlins series) and writes in other genres as well. “The Wave” is science fiction.

I should recuse myself from reviewing this book because I hate science fiction. The book jacket - which says Mosley transcends genres - lured me into taking a chance. I loved the first 88 pages, which were basically realistic with the exception of one unexplainable phenomenon.

Errol Porter, a former computer programmer currently working as a potter and courting a new girlfriend, is awakened by telephone calls from someone claiming to be his father, who had died years earlier. Porter goes to the graveyard and finds a wild young man who looks remarkably like his father and knows things only his father could have known. With that one anomaly, Mosley uses the first 15 short chapters to set a “normal” scene. Then the bad guys arrive.

A few pages later, Porter is taken to a vast underground bunker, where legions of humans struggle against a great, world-changing force. I hate when that happens. Show me a vast underground bunker and I’ll show you a plot that has jumped the boundaries of reality. If authors need to explore complex goings-on beneath the surface, why couldn’t they just go see a competent psychologist?

The resurrected dad is part of an ancient life force, the Wave, which is learning to inhabit formerly dead bodies. They too have a vast underground establishment - a big system of caves. It’s so big that Porter and his friends run down a tunnel for 30 minutes without reaching the end or getting out of earshot of the main cave. At 10 minutes a mile, that’s a tunnel longer than the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

In describing the Wave, Mosley seems to be postulating a philosophy of unity, and perhaps a new vision of God. But the book reads like a sophomoric acid trip, with no cohesive ideas, and the universal-unity-of-life theme being subverted by an us-against-them mentality.

Here’s one example: “I was tutored by the Wave during my sojourn in the cave. The few cells that connected my mind with the greater being had translated thousands of blueprints and histories, the evolution of life and the urge to grow. I often woke up exhausted from all the voices chattering in my head. Scuttling insects and great dinosaurs traveled in my mind, found their histories in me. I had come to see the sludge from the pit as God.”

Mosley is at his best when describing normal people getting through their days. He is especially sensitive to the various hues of skin color, his own being dark. “Nella … the buttercream-colored, dreadlock-wearing ceramicist.” Later, a woman is working in a garden: “Her tan was heavily laden with freckles.”

Mosley is a talented writer, worth looking for. He writes science fiction, young-adult fiction, detective fiction, general fiction and non-fiction. Pick a book that suits your taste.

“The Wave” is available at the Los Altos library.