Did these things happen? Is Mathews really Jonathan Hemlock? This isn’t much help in answering such questions, but it’s a...
Hang out with spies in distant Asian capitals, offend French communists, smoke ever so slightly expensive cigars, have no visible means of support—and the locals are likely to ask questions about a person.
So Mathews (The Human Country, 2002, etc.), expatriate novelist, learns. Well before 1973, his annus mirabilis, sundry residents of Paris suspected him of being a CIA agent, assuring him that it didn’t really matter but pleading that he confide the truth in them. “It hurt to be thought of as a spook,” Mathews writes. “Not because by that time it had become shameful but because it was simply wrong.” Farther afield, Mathews relates in a wonderful anecdote, a Filipino doctor reaches the same hurtful conclusion; when Mathews protests that he’s a writer and quotes verbatim from the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of proof, the doctor responds, “How glad I am to see that the CIA is training its men so well.” An unlikelier agent there probably has never been: Mathews, after all, is the only American to have been invited into Oulipo, the French literature-meets-science movement whose best-known exemplar is Georges Perec’s “full-length novel in which the letter e never appeared,” and in 1973 Mathews was occupying himself with progressive causes and, from time to time, explicating the bad-capitalism twists and turns of what the French were calling le ouateurguète, Watergate. (“There was a lot of arguing among members of the audience. This helped me look sober and well-informed, which I certainly wasn’t.”) One of Mathews’s literary champions, though, turns out to be a chap who just happens to work for Zapata Oil, owned by George H.W. Bush, a man with, yes, close connections to the CIA. Unlikely, too, are the twists and turns his fictional memoir takes, punctuated by little cloak-and-dagger episodes and even a spectacular moment of wetwork among the wine-and-cheese picnics al fresco.
Did these things happen? Is Mathews really Jonathan Hemlock? This isn’t much help in answering such questions, but it’s a lot of fun.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-56478-392-8
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking a far less hysterical tone than in The Shining, King has written his most sweeping horror novel in The Stand, though it may lack the spinal jingles of Salem's Lot. In part this is because The Stand, with its flow of hundreds of brand-name products, is a kind of inventory of American culture. "Superflu" has hit the U.S. and the world, rapidly wiping out the whole of civilization—excepting the one-half of one percent who are immune. Superflu is a virus with a shifting antigen base; that is, it can kill every type of antibody the human organism can muster against it. Immunity seems to be a gift from God—or the Devil. The Devil himself has become embodied in a clairvoyant called Randall Flagg, a phantom-y fellow who walks highways and is known variously as "the dark man" or "the Walking Dude" and who has set up a new empire in Las Vegas where he rules by fear, his hair giving off sparks while he floats in the lotus position. He is very angry because the immune folks in the Free Zone up at Boulder have sent a small force against him; they get their message from Him (God) through a dying black crone named Abigail, who is also clairvoyant. There are only four in this Boulder crew, led by Stu Redman from East Texas, who is in love with pregnant Fran back in the Free Zone. Good and Evil come to an atomic clash at the climax, the Book of Revelations working itself out rather too explicitly. But more importantly, there are memorable scenes of the superflu spreading hideously, Fifth Avenue choked with dead cars, Flagg's minions putting up fresh lightbulbs all over Vegas. . . . Some King fans will be put off by the pretensions here; most will embrace them along with the earthier chilis.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1978
ISBN: 0307743683
Page Count: 1450
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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