A novel brimming with ideas, ambition, imagination, and possibility yet one in which the characters remain richly engaging...
A Mobius strip of a novel in which time is more a loop than a path and various possibilities seem to exist simultaneously.
Science fiction provides a literary launching pad for this audacious sophomore novel by Palmer (The Dream of Perpetual Motion, 2010). It offers some of the same pleasures as one of those state-of-the-union (domestic and national) epics by Jonathan Franzen, yet its speculative nature becomes increasingly apparent as the novel progresses (while its characters apparently don’t). From the first page, protagonist Rebecca Wright, who works at a computer dating service, feels a "weird, persistent unease"; she thinks the world around her suffers from “a certain subtle wrongness.” Her physicist husband, Philip Steiner, heads a team that's working on what others would call a time machine, though the scientists avoid that label; they don't think their project will create a true time machine, but their research (and even their mistakes) might provide useful discoveries along the way. Rebecca and Philip's son, Sean, who's in second grade, has been an artistic prodigy since preschool, according to his mother, but his father doesn’t understand him at all. As Palmer’s narrative offers sleight-of-hand revelations with absolute command, it becomes apparent that the time they are living in, which often seems to be a comment on the present, is in fact the near future, one in which automobiles drive themselves and the president is capable of appearing on anyone’s home TV to address them personally. It's also increasingly obvious that Rebecca is an alcoholic, in deep denial. The plot pivots on a climactic car crash, a malfunction of the automatic automobile, after Sean has been unfairly disciplined with a detention at school, Rebecca is too inebriated to leave the house, and Philip is too busy at work to intercede, leaving the question of who is behind the wheel and who survives subject to revision. The novel circles back to this pivotal incident time and again; as this plot writes and then overwrites itself, each member of the nuclear family might possibly die, yet all remain crucial to the denouement. Muses Philip, “Ulysses is not a story, so much as a system of the world. A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
A novel brimming with ideas, ambition, imagination, and possibility yet one in which the characters remain richly engaging for the reader.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-90759-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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