From the author of 1986's Fighting with Shadows comes this sprawling novel about one Irish couple caught in a labyrinth of love and hate, in a torn nation that publicly mirrors their private strife. Jack, a playwright and fisherman just off the sea, is pining for his girlfriend Catherine and driving himself mad with drink and waiting. Catherine refuses to see him again unless he's sober, but by the time he is, it's too late: She won't take him back. In the middle section of the book, Jack tells Catherine's story before returning to more of his own drunken ramblings. Catherine was born in Northern Ireland to an aging Presbyterian policeman and his Republican, and Methodist, young wife. Jonathan Adams, the father, was a failed minister who joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Ulster has been changing around Adamshis quiet country police station has been transformed into a gated fortressand one day, while assigned to keep the peace during a Republican demonstration, he instead became enraged at a protester, wielded his baton, and instigated a bloody riot. Soon after, his Catholic friend and neighbor hanged himself from a tree. Shocked by what he had become, and contributed to, Adams succumbed to his wife's pleas to buy an old lightkeeper's house on the barren west coast of Ireland as their retreat from violence and the site of Jonathan's attempts at redemption. Jonathan died when Catherine was a young woman, and, meeting Jack Ferris, she quickly shifted her emotional attentions to him. Their relationship became as obsessive as her father's faith, and, stewed in liquor and paranoia, their destruction, like Ireland's, seemed driven by its own startling momentum. Catherine's story is the heart of this novel, with Jack's drunken bookendsoverlong and adding littlesurrounding it. Healy, however, does have an encompassing eye, and a terrific sense of the Irish people and their great good humor. An epic and compelling lament that just goes on a little too long.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86156-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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