TRIANGULATION

by Phil Whitaker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

Britisher Whitaker's second novel (but first to be published in the US) leans on the cartographic technique of triangulation to map human hearts in a love trio. In the mid-1950s, fresh from a hitch in the army, John Hopkins takes a job as librarian with the government's mapmaking service, Ordnance Survey. He is a cautious, fastidious, prudish, and lonely man whose ambition has always been simply to draw a salary for hiding out in a bureaucracy. Thus Whitaker sets himself the task of writing about a boring man in an interesting way, which he attempts by having John report on his, by contrast, rather dashing roommate, Laurance Wallace. Laurance heads off for Kenya just as the African colonies, British, French, and Belgian, are about to heave out their colonizers. He's a surveyor for a kindred agency, the Directorate of Overseas Surveys, and both his fieldwork and John's retrieval work become necessary in the deployment of troops and the drawing of boundaries. Both men fall in love with Helen, a coworker, but she concludes, rightly enough, that John is a boring if likable man and sets her course by Laurance's star. In a scene out of ""The Snows of Kilimanjaro,"" Laurance dies in a jungle camp, leaving Helen five months pregnant and destitute. Years later, upon his retirement, John conducts a rather silly errand, to take a look at the geographic center of England, a village called Dunsop Bridge, as an excuse to look up Helen, whom he has never stopped loving. Helen retains some affection for him, but even 40 years after his death she still loves Laurance more. Whitaker's prose is elegant and precise, and his nostalgia for simpler times congenial, but the reader may agree with Helen that John, though awfully decent, is rather tiresome.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: ---

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Picador/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1999

Categories: FICTION