Did these things happen? Is Mathews really Jonathan Hemlock? This isn’t much help in answering such questions, but it’s a...
Hang out with spies in distant Asian capitals, offend French communists, smoke ever so slightly expensive cigars, have no visible means of support—and the locals are likely to ask questions about a person.
So Mathews (The Human Country, 2002, etc.), expatriate novelist, learns. Well before 1973, his annus mirabilis, sundry residents of Paris suspected him of being a CIA agent, assuring him that it didn’t really matter but pleading that he confide the truth in them. “It hurt to be thought of as a spook,” Mathews writes. “Not because by that time it had become shameful but because it was simply wrong.” Farther afield, Mathews relates in a wonderful anecdote, a Filipino doctor reaches the same hurtful conclusion; when Mathews protests that he’s a writer and quotes verbatim from the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of proof, the doctor responds, “How glad I am to see that the CIA is training its men so well.” An unlikelier agent there probably has never been: Mathews, after all, is the only American to have been invited into Oulipo, the French literature-meets-science movement whose best-known exemplar is Georges Perec’s “full-length novel in which the letter e never appeared,” and in 1973 Mathews was occupying himself with progressive causes and, from time to time, explicating the bad-capitalism twists and turns of what the French were calling le ouateurguète, Watergate. (“There was a lot of arguing among members of the audience. This helped me look sober and well-informed, which I certainly wasn’t.”) One of Mathews’s literary champions, though, turns out to be a chap who just happens to work for Zapata Oil, owned by George H.W. Bush, a man with, yes, close connections to the CIA. Unlikely, too, are the twists and turns his fictional memoir takes, punctuated by little cloak-and-dagger episodes and even a spectacular moment of wetwork among the wine-and-cheese picnics al fresco.
Did these things happen? Is Mathews really Jonathan Hemlock? This isn’t much help in answering such questions, but it’s a lot of fun.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-56478-392-8
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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