A grim examination of the effects of war on those who would give anything not to be waging it.
No one is sinless enough to cast the proverbial stone—but in this freighted, violence-punctuated novel by Danish journalist Jensen (We, the Drowned, 2011, etc.), the sins mount page by page.
Why are Westerners, including a detachment of Danish soldiers, in Afghanistan, especially so long after bin Laden has been done away with? Well, says a tough-as-nails commander named Schrøder, “We believe in free will, don’t we? That’s why you’re here. That’s why I’m here. And that’s why the Americans are here. To force the Afghans to recognize the existence of free will.” That observation comes toward the end of a long, bloody tale that would do Søren Kierkegaard proud—if, that is, Kierkegaard had been a novelist. Jensen depicts a group of one-foot-in-the-grave fighters, men and women who learn in the decidedly situational arena of Afghanistan that things are never as they seem: The American mercenaries whom they fight alongside have loyalty only to their wallets, a predilection that soon enough infects members of the Danish contingent, who are quick to abandon their philosophical interests in the quest for dollars. “Are you working for the Taliban?” a senior officer asks Schrøder, who answers, “Good question….I work for myself. I take advantage of the chances I get. Today’s friends are tomorrow’s enemies.” Indeed, about the only people to be trusted in Jensen’s twist-full story are the Taliban fighters arrayed against the Americans, Danes, and Brits who populate it: They, at least, have moral clarity and a sense of purpose, as opposed to Schrøder, who had worked in civilian life as a designer of video games in which “skinhead assassins" unleashed all sorts of mayhem—good training, as it happens, for the ugliness to come. Jensen is unflinching in describing that mayhem as it figures in the real world of his novel, from rape and torture to one particularly brutal scene in which flayed bodies line a road like so many victims on the road to Golgotha.
A grim examination of the effects of war on those who would give anything not to be waging it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4439-4
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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