This brief fable, the second work in the science-fiction series begun with Shikasta (1979), is bound to be read as a return to the portrayals of sexual politics responsible for Lessing's initial vogue. And indeed she has again taken up a favorite theme: the story of a chosen one's painful and humiliating struggle to obey an imperfectly understood summons, the redemption of a world meanwhile hanging in the balance. In the past, Lessing's thorny presentations of this motif—something like a modern Paradise Regained—have generated confusion, even annoyance. But this version, though superficially only an arid schema in which the queen of a serene matriarchy marries the king of a neighboring warrior state, is in fact Lessing's most humane and loving variation on the theme. The states in question are two of the levels of being mentioned in the first novel as lying around Shikasta (Earth) in six concentric shells progressively more open to the illumination of the lofty colonizing world, Canopus. AlIth, queen of the sane, civilized, and radiant Zone Three, is commanded by the unseen "Providers" (presumably the Canopeans) to descend to the stultifying air of Zone Four, there to marry the arrogant Ben Ata. As her own people see it, her marriage gradually corrupts her to the sexual serfdom and emotional crudities of a lower existence. But in the devious ways of the oppressed Zone Four women, AlIth eventually discovers a treasury of spiritual aspirations ironically forgotten in the bright and well-conducted "higher" world. At last she is ready to pass beyond both realms of being to a condition that surpasses either, while Zone Four has glimpsed enough of the truth shining through all conditions to disband its army and set about civilizing the desert marauders on the border of Zone Five. True, Lessing is not the writer to carry off improving parables with flawless elegance. The gracelessness of her prose style has never been more conspicuous, and her impatience with uncongenial detail makes the war economy of Zone Four a silly cartoon sketch. But there is a sweetness and generosity about this work not quite like anything she has done; like the difficult but moving Shikasta, it seems to encompass and summarize dozens of her previous concerns with a sort of piercing magnanimity.
Pub Date: April 4, 1980
ISBN: 0006547206
Page Count: 17
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1980
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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