Gourgey’s wide range of references creates an entertaining, albeit dense, tale of the dangers and benefits of science and...
Philosophy, scientific theory, literary allusion, espionage and magic combine to create a world where secrets in hidden lands and laboratories threaten a post-apocalyptic civilization.
Two towering intellects, the inventive scientific genius Dr. Magigate (also known as “the Captain”) and his nemesis and soul mate the Prophet (a beautiful, charismatic, temperamental woman who leads the world of commerce) engage in an epic struggle that twists and turns for over 50 years. Both think their cause just; each seeks to control the other through science and ruthless force. The “glide” of the title refers to an invention of Dr. Magigate’s that manipulates gravity to provide power without the use of fossil fuels. The novel opens with scenes from the warring past where a virus that first destroyed fabricated objects then mutated to infect humans. The story then moves backward to show how the authoritarian Academy, led by the Prophet, hunted down the young Magigate when he refused to collaborate. The story then abruptly moves to a futuristic present. Here, teenaged Michael and Madeleine trespass onto the secret hideaway of an elderly Magigate and unwittingly wander into a dangerous situation. Chapters dedicated to the adventures of the young pair include glimpses into the gadgets and teen lifestyles of the day (with footnotes explaining inventions such as holographic books). Other sections dwell more on philosophy than adventure, as when the Captain tells his followers on Isla de Tiempo Muerto—his hideaway—that there are three ways to see the world; the seer’s way, the general’s way and the magician’s way, and the novel explores all three. It’s easy to get confused in this story that combines elements of the Oedipus legend, the Kingdom of Narnia, the Land of Oz and the battles of Star Wars with scientific theories. While story lines merge at the conclusion, a time chart or list of characters would have helped the reader of this lengthy work to navigate from one story line and perspective to another.
Gourgey’s wide range of references creates an entertaining, albeit dense, tale of the dangers and benefits of science and love.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0979743597
Page Count: 417
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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