Though it ultimately doesn’t satisfy as either tragedy or farce, this is far more than an actor’s vanity project: Thewlis...
The first novel from actor Thewlis (best actor winner at Cannes for Mike Leigh’s Naked) is a rollicking, no-corpses-barred black comedy set in the London art world.
Well-regarded painter Hector Kipling has reached a plateau. His enormous portraits command top prices, but lately his longtime pal and rival, Lenny Snook, a conceptual artist, has eclipsed him in fame. Hector’s romance with Eleni is calm and happy, but doesn’t calm and happy mean stultifying, perilously close to bourgeois? What he needs, he muses, is a little death. Thewlis delivers a few little deaths (see Hector’s disastrous fling with an American poet who favors sex games involving lighters and knives), but his main preoccupation is the bigger kind, and death doesn’t come half-stepping: Suddenly Hector’s artist friend Kirk is terminal, likewise Eleni’s mother in Greece, likewise Hector’s father, and before long Hector’s life, personal and professional, goes into a death spiral. Alas, his sufferings are as stylized as opera, or slapstick (in one scene Hector, naked, dangles from a drainpipe outside the window of the deranged madman/dandy/sex-abuse victim who’s out to kill him). But the art-world milieu is deftly handled, and there’s a splendidly mean and morbid wit at play in this antic account of a man whose life seems a “drunken collaboration between Feydeau and Dante.”
Though it ultimately doesn’t satisfy as either tragedy or farce, this is far more than an actor’s vanity project: Thewlis has talent.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4121-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
Ambitious and very well written, despite the occasional overreach. When it’s made into a film, bet that Kim Jong Il will...
Note to self: Do not schedule a vacation in North Korea, at least not without an escape plan.
The protagonist of Johnson’s (Parasites Like Us, 2003, etc.) darkly satisfying if somewhat self-indulgent novel is Pak Jun Do, the conflicted son of a singer. He knows no more, for “That was all Jun Do’s father, the Orphan Master, would say about her.” The Orphan Master runs an orphanage, but David Copperfield this ain’t: Jun Do may have been the only non-orphan in the place, but that doesn’t keep his father, a man of influence, from mistreating him as merrily as if he weren’t one of his own flesh and blood. For this is the land of Kim Jong Il, the unhappy Potemkin Village land of North Korea, where even Josef Stalin would have looked around and thought the whole business excessive. Johnson’s tale hits the ground running, and fast: Jun Do is recruited into a unit that specializes in kidnapping Koreans, and even non-Koreans, living outside the magic kingdom: doctors, film directors, even the Dear Leader’s personal sushi chef. “There was a Japanese man. He took his dog for a walk. And then he was nowhere. For the people who knew him, he’d forever be nowhere.” So ponders Jun Do, who, specializing in crossing the waters to Japan, sneaking out of tunnels and otherwise working his ghostlike wonders, rises up quickly in the state apparatus, only to fall after a bungled diplomatic trip to the United States. Johnson sets off in the land of John le Carré, but by the time Jun Do lands in Texas we’re in a Pynchonesque territory of impossibilities, and by the time he’s in the pokey we’re in a subplot worthy of Akutagawa. Suffice it to say that Jun Do switches identities, at which point thriller becomes picaresque satire and rifles through a few other genres, shifting narrators, losing and regaining focus and point of view. The reader will have to grant the author room to accommodate the show-offishness, which seems to say, with the rest of the book, that in a world run by a Munchkin overlord like Kim, nothing can be too surreal. Indeed, once Fearless Leader speaks, he’s a model of weird clarity: “But let’s speak of our shared status as nuclear nations another time. Now let’s have some blues.”
Ambitious and very well written, despite the occasional overreach. When it’s made into a film, bet that Kim Jong Il will want to score an early bootleg.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9279-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
An audacious epic with more than enough heart to fill its many, many pages.
When Richard "Dodge" Forthrast dies under anesthesia for a routine medical procedure, his story is just beginning.
As the founder and chairman of a video game company, Dodge has a pretty sweet life. He has money to burn and a loving relationship with his niece, Zula, and grandniece, Sophia. So when he dies unexpectedly, there are a lot of people to mourn him, including his friend Corvallis Kawasaki, who is also the executor of his will. To make matters worse (or, to say the least, more complicated), there's something unexpected in Dodge's last wishes. It turns out that in his youth he put it in writing that he wanted his brain to be preserved until such technology existed that his consciousness could be uploaded into a computer. And much to everyone's surprise, that technology isn't so far off after all. Years later, Sophia grows up to follow in her clever grand-uncle's footsteps and figures out a way to turn on Dodge's brain. It is at this point that the novel splits into two narratives: "Meatspace," or what we would call the real world, and "Bitworld," inhabited by Dodge (now called "Egdod") and increasing numbers of downloaded minds. Stephenson (co-author: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, 2017; Seveneves, 2015, etc.) is known for ambitious books, and this doorstop of a novel is certainly no exception. Life in Bitworld is more reminiscent of high fantasy than science fiction as the ever evolving narrative plays with the daily reality of living in a digital space. Would you have special abilities like a mythical god? Join your aura together with other souls and live as a hive mind? Create hills and rivers from nothing? Destroy your enemies with tech-given powers that seem magical? Readers looking for a post-human thought experiment might be disappointed with the references to ancient mythology, but those ready for an endlessly inventive and absorbing story are in for an adventure they won't soon forget.
An audacious epic with more than enough heart to fill its many, many pages.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-245871-1
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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