Hopelessly contrived.
English author McGregor makes her US debut with three books in one: the story of a wandering polar bear; a fictionalized account of Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage; and, last but not least, a modern-day tearjerker.
Sam Marshall, a two-year-old stricken with aplastic anemia, will die unless a bone-marrow donor can be found. The nearest match may well be his much older half-brother John, a marine archaeologist who’s now lost somewhere in the Arctic while he looks for traces of the Franklin Expedition. Sam's mother, Jo Harper, the young and lovely widow of BBC-TV commentator and marine archaeologist Douglas Marshall, angered John's mother, Alicia, several years ago when Jo came to interview her about her famous ex-husband. And that was before Jo fell in love with Doug, who then died in a car crash that spared his grown son. The first Mrs. Marshall still hasn't gotten over her pique at her ex's lifelong obsession with the Franklin Expedition, and she's not about to help Jo find John. But there are others who will, among them Catherine Takkiruq, the half-Inuit beauty who loves John and is conveniently nearby in London. The race to find the young man begins, although no one knows for certain whether he's a match for Sam. Or whether Sam will even survive. See Sam waste away pathetically (and much more quickly than most victims of aplastic anemia would, the author notes coyly in an afterword). See the majestic polar bear stride across the frozen waste. See the stalwart 19th-century explorers perish one by one from cold and disease and starvation. See the author do her hardest to tie this triple-threat plot together in every possible way: the polar bear is a mother too, with a sick cub.
Hopelessly contrived.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94567-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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