Lively prose and a weakness for hilariously bad “death jokes” are prominent among the pleasures offered by this otherwise overwrought satirical fantasy: the conclusion of a loose trilogy depicting a godless near-future (Towing Jehovah, 1994; Blameless in Abaddon,1996). The millennium has dawned, and God (Who died some time ago) exists only as the “Cranium Dei” (His disembodied skull), which orbits the Earth daily, as a second sun-and-moon and a celestial memento mori. Morrow’s insanely ingenious plot, reminiscent, variously, of B’science-fiction movies in the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, and Terry Southern at his most charmingly deranged, brings together several characters unwilling to accept evidence of the planet’s (and their own) mortality, and involves them with patently symbolic avatars of the new nihilism (for example, Dr. Adrian Lucido, a crack psychoanalyst who specializes in euthanasia for the unwilling—thus “preparing” people for immortality. It’s probably best not to try to figure out all the twists and turns, and simply enjoy such feisty survivors as florist delivery-person Nora Shafron and her adolescent son Kevin, who’s one of the first victims of a “plague” that renders humans subject to their “private demons” (Kevin’s is a wisecracking ghoul named Quincy); famed sculptor Gerard Korty, whose herculean effort to render Dante’s Divine Comedy into stone earns a commission from the Vatican to create a reliquary for “God’s bones”—with inartistic, indeed chaotic consequences; and the captain of a tanker who’s responsible for a major oil spill and experiences a most curious redemption. Besides transfiguring Dante, Morrow makes amusing use of Emily Dickinson’s more morbid poems, and the grave and reverend figures of Erasmus and Luther (whom Gerard imagines in heated theological discussion). If you get a kick out of the pre-Christian epic of Gilgamesh dramatized and performed by “The Great Sumerian Traveling Circus and Repertory Company,” and stuff like that, then this is the millennial novel for you. If not, there’s always The Divine Comedy.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-129325-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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