Actor Hackman collaborates with Lenihan, a scuba-diving and sunken-ship aficionado, on an American swashbuckler aspiring to be the next Aubrey-Maturin. It takes about a hundred pages for 17-year-old Jack O’Reilly to witness his trusting Irish father and worldly-wise Cuban mother cheated out of their land and then murdered by a dastardly Spaniard, Count de Silva. Left for dead by the Count’s minions, Jack himself staggers back to the Perdido Star, the US merchant ship that brought his family to Cuba, and is welcomed aboard by the ship’s first mate, a kindly seasoned salt named Quince. From there, the voyage becomes a series of action pieces interwoven with narratives of seafaring lore as Jack goes halfway around the world, enduring darkly violent storms and vivid battles on land and sea as he grows to manhood, earns the respect of the crew, and returns to Havana as the notorious Pacific pirate “Black Jack” O’Reilly set upon avenging his parents. Set in 1805, when America was doing a bad job of staying neutral during the Napoleonic Wars, what saves this seafarer from being yet another serving of half-baked Sabatini is the peculiar expertise the authors add about Kentucky rifles and makeshift diving when Jack, naive genius that he is, invents a diving bell to rescue his father’s gun-making equipment while the crew is marooned on an atoll somewhere west of Tahiti. For full effect, add a few postmodern Hollywood casting decisions that include an Queeg-like captain, a pompous Dutch slaver, a Chinese martial arts expert masquerading as a cook, a sentimental balladeer, and an annoying French American schoolboy, Paul Le Maire, who peckishly corrects villains when they misquote Shakespeare and Voltaire. Standard swashbuckler that’s slow at the start but then delivers satisfying action and rousing derring-do, even if the characterizations are as thin as Errol Flynn’s tights. (Literary Guild featured alternate; $100,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55704-398-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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