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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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