With unabashed echoes of all the great "river novels," from Huckleberry Finn to Heart of Darkness to The African Queen, Ballard (The Crystal World, Crash, Empire of the Sun) offers here a poetic, stately, oddly half-involving tale—part escape/chase adventure, part symbolic soul-journey. The narrator-seeker is British doctor Mallory, in charge of the WHO clinic at Port-la-Nouvelle in an unnamed nation "in the dead heart of the African continent," bordering on Chad and the Sudan. The area has been depopulated by the spreading Sahara desert, by civil war between government forces (vile) and Marxist guerrillas (worse). So, virtually without patients, Mallory has focused instead on a local engineering project, seemingly doomed: digging wells for irrigation. Obsessed, he refuses to leave Port-la-Nouvelle—despite a near-fatal encounter with the guerrillas, despite the obnoxious arrival of pathetic Prof. Sanger, a has-been purveyor of pop-science who's desperate to generate some sort of media-event for a TV documentary. And Mallory's mania escalates when, for unclear reasons (earthquake? wayward engineering?), a brand-new river appears precisely where Mallory has been digging! Mallory reacts to this quasi-miracle with wild ambivalence. He believes the river is his creation; he's soon referring to it as "the Mallory." Yet he now determines to destroy it—to follow it north to its source, to dam it up so that it irrigates the Sahara. (Or "was my attempt to scotch the river nothing more than the last installment of that suicide by easy payments on which I had embarked by first choosing to work at Port-la-Nouvelle?") Teaming up with 12-year-old Noon, a sometime girl-guerrilla, Mallory steals a ferry and sails upriver—chased via helicopter by reptilian Capt. Kagwa, whose beloved Mercedes limo (totem of his power-grabbing dreams) is on the ferry. Also in pursuit: feverish Prof. Sanger and his equally frail Indian sidekick; wildlife activist Nora Warrender, out to avenge the guerrillas' murder of her husband; plus, of course, the guerrillas themselves. And the ensuing action—boat collisions, copter attacks, exploding dams—is textured with Mallory's sporadic self-analysis. . .and with his increasingly erotic attachment to Noon, who seems to embody the traumatized spirit of native populations. Mallory's inner turmoil, with constant mood-shifts and philosophical flip-flops, is often more tiresome than compelling—and never connected to a credible psycho-portrait. The novel's mixture of tones—satiric, symbolic, derring-do-ish—doesn't quite ignite. Still, if rather murky in overall thrust, chapter by chapter this is rich, strange work from a distinctive storyteller: elegantly phrased, vividly imagined, and rescued from portentousness by a deeply ironic tilt.
Pub Date: April 1, 1988
ISBN: 0312421281
Page Count: -
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
