Politically engaged characters experience life after apartheid in Van Wyk’s debut novel.
Van Wyk, who grew up in South Africa, firmly grasps the country’s history. The novel seems to waver between fiction and nonfiction and follows two families: One is black and one white, and they have worked side by side for generations on the farm Vergenoeg. Not far into the novel, 65-year-old Andries Mokwebo, a black farmhand, takes legal action against his white employer, Fanie Botha, for rights to the farm. The legal action comes at a time when the country is readily redistributing white-owned farmland to blacks. Andries wants the land so he can secure his teenage son Sephiwe’s financial future, yet he suspects that his actions are unfair to his employer, a good man. Sephiwe, one of the novel’s most believable characters, can understand the moral complexities with which his father and Fanie are grappling, but he’s more interested in his own intellectual curiosities (he muses, “the mystery surrounding the motion of the heavenly bodies serene in its being”) than in his father’s problems. The second narrative arc is about a love affair between a young black, female farmhand, Nandi, and her employer’s son, Koos. Both stories hold interest—at least at first—but the novel stagnates due to long and too frequent exchanges about politics, which are forced and inauthentic. From the relatively uneducated Andries, readers see dialogue like this: “For us all to survive in South Africa and for that matter in Africa, the problems we are faced with must become our collective national challenge. That is the only route for us to take, to save Africa, our fatherland.” Does anybody really talk like this to other family members around the dinner table? The story also often lacks spontaneity because Van Wyk tells too much and shows too little. A well-thought-out narrative made richer by Van Wyk’s opinions and knowledge and poorer by one-dimensional characters and a predictable plot.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483693361
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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