Superimposing your own monsters on a barbaric war doesn’t work.
Fearsome robots compound the misery of Sierra Leone’s civil war, in an over-the-top first novel from British journalist Paxton that lurches through various genres.
The robots are imaginary, but the civil war was all too real. One of the players was the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), notorious for its chopping off of hands and its high proportion of child soldiers, and one of its leaders was the self-styled General Butt Naked. (Actually, Paxton “borrows” him from Liberia.) The teenager encounters Father Jack, an alcoholic Irish scientist, in the bush, and supplies him with body parts; Jack wires these together, and adds a dash of the Ebola virus, to create homunculi, or small robots. Which brings us to Rindert, a South African mercenary escorting two members of the Japanese cult that gassed the Tokyo subway system. These virus hunters are after the Ebola but are killed by a landmine before they reach Jack’s village; Rindert, unhurt, talks to Jack and sees dollar signs. Why not sell the deadly robots on the world market to assorted warlords and drug kingpins? He has the perfect contact in England, Dr. Pleasant, another South African who committed unspeakable crimes for the apartheid government. Rindert and Pleasant set up an auction (the crux of the novel) and a cross-section of bad guys travel to Jack’s village. It’s a crazy project, but Paxton’s writing has a nervous energy that might have made us temporary believers if he had stayed focused. Unfortunately, he wanders all over the lot: cult meetings in Tokyo, harebrained missions in England and RUF shenanigans in Freetown. The author, a British journalist, can’t decide if he’s writing suspense, horror or black comedy (though few readers will find anything funny in the trashing of child soldiers). There’s even a note of whimsy: The robots need imported distilled moonlight to stay functional. This doesn’t mix well with the pervasive carnage that Paxton describes with disconcerting relish.
Superimposing your own monsters on a barbaric war doesn’t work.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-230-00736-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Macmillan UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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