Readers initially intrigued by the story’s action are likely to come away with deeper thoughts on mechanisms of control.
McGrath (Does Environmental Law Work?, 2010) delivers a thriller about suppressed truths and a secret organization bent on protecting them.
At the outset of this story, set around 2005, the heavy-drinking Sean McKenna finds himself at a Jerusalem cafe. Now in his late 50s, Sean spent some time working for the U.S. government as a linguist and cryptographer during the Vietnam War. He later turned his experiences into a book with “impressive sales,” and his current plans revolve around writing a novel, establishing contacts with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to “do some mild investigation,” and eventually achieving “the good life on a private Caribbean Island.” His grand scheme is interrupted, however, when he falls for beautiful archaeologist Faith Foley. Fifteen years Sean’s junior, she’s involved in an excavation that may lead to some startling religious discoveries. When a digger on her crew suddenly fears for his life, terrified of the secret religious organization Opus Dei, Faith sends him to meet Sean. But before they can converse, the digger is gunned down. Faith and Sean flee for their lives, but they’re quickly intercepted by a Mossad agent. Everyone seems to have the same question: what could a simple laborer have known that would get him murdered in public? Sean and Faith subsequently flee Mossad, but the plot thickens to involve the truth behind some aspects of Christianity and people who prefer such information to remain hidden. The action features a Blackhawk helicopter, hooded men with AK-47s, and a plethora of violent scuffles that keep the adventure lively. The portions of the novel exposing murky religious orders cover material that’s been explored in popular fiction before (as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a book Sean admits that he hasn’t read, prompting Faith to briefly explain Opus Dei to him). However, the story here ventures into even deeper evils. The dialogue is often obvious, as when Sean demands that someone “Find a seat and buckle up!” That said, some of the same character’s musings provide insights; at one point, he reflects that religion was once the opiate of the masses, but now the powers that be use “patriotism, fiery rhetoric and the means to deliver it to the people who still think they control their government.”
Readers initially intrigued by the story’s action are likely to come away with deeper thoughts on mechanisms of control.Pub Date: June 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62901-105-9
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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