An impressively imagined debut offers a devilishly cunning speculation on how a sinful world might greet news of a messiah's appearance come the millennium. Jerusalem-based WNN-TV correspondent John Feldman gets appreciably more than he ever bargained for on New Year's Eve, 1999. Expecting to provide only cursory coverage of local observances, the journalist and his cameraman, Breck Hunter, wind up investigating the mysterious destruction of a hush-hush Israel Defense Force (IDF) lab in the Negev Desert. The sole survivor of this cataclysm is an ethereal young woman called Jeza, whom millennarian groups throughout the world soon hail as their long- awaited redeemer. Spouting gnomic parables, citing a gospel known as Apotheosis (from the so-called ``Newest'' Testament), and performing the occasional miracle, the arriviste divinity travels the holy lands of the Middle East, urging ever larger congregations of Christians, Jews, and Muslims to forsake the distractive trappings of formal liturgies. With logistical assistance from Feldman's ratings-obsessed network, the deity is soon able to present her provocative message (fiercely resisted by established religions) to a wider world from forums in Salt Lake City, the Vatican, and Washington. Meanwhile, word leaks out that the IDF facility was engaged in genetic engineering projects, which could make Jeza a robot with artificial intelligence of a very high order rather than anyone's savior. During the Lenten season, hopes for peace on earth evanesce as Armageddon-scale violence racks key venues, and the Antichrist or True Prophetess is martyred at the close of a Good Friday sermon before the Wailing Wall. While cooler heads in Rome ponder, IDF renegades, die-hard ecclesiastics, and others with apocalyptic axes to grind vie to ensure—or abort- -Jeza's resurrection on Easter morning. Deliciously wicked entertainment that combines biotech with theological arcana to mount an effective (and often offensive) assault upon churches militant, affluent, and complacent. (TV rights to Columbia/Tri-Star)
Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52285-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual...
Stephenson’s prodigious new yarn (after The Diamond Age, 1995, etc.) whirls from WWII cryptography and top-secret bullion shipments to a present-day quest by computer whizzes to build a data haven amid corporate shark-infested waters, by way of multiple present-tense narratives overlaid with creeping paranoia.
In 1942, phenomenally talented cryptanalyst Lawrence Waterhouse is plucked from the ruins of Pearl Harbor and posted to Bletchley Park, England, center of Allied code-breaking operations. Problem: having broken the highest German and Japanese codes, how can the Allies use the information without revealing by their actions that the codes have been broken? Enter US Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe, specialist in cleanup details, statistical adjustments, and dirty jobs. In the present, meanwhile, Waterhouse’s grandson, the computer-encryption whiz Randy, tries to set up a data haven in Southeast Asia, one secure from corporate rivals, nosy governments, and inquisitive intelligence services. He teams up with Shaftoe’s stunning granddaughter, Amy, while pondering mysterious, e-mails from root@eruditorum.org, who’s developed a weird but effective encoding algorithm. Everything, of course, eventually links together. During WWII, Waterhouse and Shaftoe investigate a wrecked U-boat, discovering a consignment of Chinese gold bars, and sheets of a new, indecipherable code. Code-named Arethusa, this material ends up with Randy, presently beset by enemies like his sometime backer, The Dentist. He finds himself in a Filipino jail accused of drug smuggling, along with Shaftoe’s old associate, Enoch Root (root@eruditorum.org!). Since his jailers give him his laptop back, he knows someone’s listening. So he uses his computing skills to confuse the eavesdroppers, decodes Arethusa, and learns the location of a huge hoard of gold looted from Asia by the Japanese.
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual vainglorious style; still, there’s surprisingly little actual plot. And the huge chunks of baldly technical material might fascinate NSA chiefs, computer nerds, and budding entrepreneurs, but ordinary readers are likely to balk: showtime, with lumps.Pub Date: May 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97346-4
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
IN THE NEWS
An engrossing and haunting psychological thriller.
A young newlywed's life is upended, and a picturesque neighborhood is shattered, when she is suspected of a savage murder.
At the beginning of a new year, Joey Mullen moves back to England from Ibiza with Alfie, her husband, whom she hastily married out of grief over the death of her mother. Jack, Joey’s older brother, invites the young couple to move into his painted Victorian house in the upscale Bristol neighborhood of Melville Heights so they can get on their feet financially and help with the baby that Jack and his wife, Rebecca, are expecting. Joey quickly becomes infatuated with their neighbor Tom Fitzwilliam, a new headmaster charged with improving the local school. Her crush only intensifies when Alfie suggests having a baby, and Joey begins to suspect her marriage was a mistake. Meanwhile, Tom’s wife, Nicola, struggles to fill her days and remains oblivious to their son, Freddie, who regularly spies on his neighbors and the village's teenage schoolgirls, taking their photos and keeping a detailed log of everyone's activities. This surveillance exacerbates the paranoia and mental illness of another neighbor, the mother of 16-year-old Jenna, one of Tom’s students. Jenna’s mother is convinced that she knows the Fitzwilliam family from a vacation incident years earlier (and that the family is now stalking her), but Jenna is more concerned that Tom may be having an inappropriate relationship with her best friend. After several months, tension in the neighborhood explodes, and Joey is suspected of a brutal murder. However, as the police gather evidence, it becomes clear how many secrets each family has been hiding. Jewell (Then She Was Gone, 2017, etc.) adeptly weaves together a complex array of characters in her latest thriller. The novel opens with the murder investigation and deftly maintains its intensity and brisk pace even as the story moves through different moments in time over the previous three months. Jewell’s use of third-person narration allows her to explore each family’s anxieties and sorrows, which ultimately makes this novel’s ending all the more unsettling.
An engrossing and haunting psychological thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9007-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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