A somewhat clichÇd approach to storytelling—a retirement home resident relates her life story—offers mixed results, thanks in part to a huge gap left in the narrative. Octogenarian Viola Bagg finds herself underwater when the Cessna she's in dives into a pond, trapping her in an air bubble created by the windshield. As water slowly seeps in and her oxygen diminishes, Viola relives the events of her life. Though born on Wallawalhalla, a tropical island in the East Indian Ocean, the infant Viola was carted back home to Ontario, Canada, after her mother's mysterious death. There, she endures a dull childhood under the care of her reserved father until, years later, she returns to Wallawalhalla as a young woman to offer secretarial support to an archaeological dig. But what with the island's eccentric colonial inhabitants (including the elderly Miss Bartram, who believes Viola's mother was kidnapped and made empress of the white ants) and the kind of scandalous behavior that wouldn't wash in Canada, more is eventually buried than dug up. Viola and best friend Jenny are living with Jenny's Uncle Roddy, the dig's photographer, and his vacant wife Emma, who suffers from mysterious bruises and black eyes. After an unfortunate turn of events, Uncle Roddy is thrown from a cliff. Ever after, Viola leads a cautious life, hoping to avoid the kind of murderous excitement she experienced that Wallawalhalla summer. She marries Harry Bagg, an archaeologist. They travel the globe, have a daughter, and divorce. The next 50-odd years are skipped (to the detriment of the narrative), and we pick up with a now-aged Viola at long last striking out independently, throwing caution to the wind with an aviator boyfriend and a whole new identity, which may or may not survive the crash. Despite its breach in continuity, Anderson's first fiction nevertheless offers a likable assemblage of characters—and we do end up caring about Viola's fate.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-571-19884-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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