A spiritual SF eco-drama that serves up considerable food for thought after an overly complicated setup.
A psychic Catholic priest joins a government project to train dolphins in O’Doran’s debut SF novel.
In what appears to be the late 21st century, rising seas have devastated humankind, and among the societies thrown into turmoil is the United States, now merged with Mexico as MEXUS. The plague- and poverty-stricken MEXUS is under the political spell of TV evangelist and murderer Amos Bilby, who captivates masses with a “Prosperity Gospel” message that Jesus wants everyone to be rich. This version of Christianity also abhors any animals that aren’t exploitable as food or labor. (Yet, paradoxically, readers are told that ape language has been deciphered and that a kind of telepathic internet has enhanced human-to-animal communication.) In the Pacific Northwest, the MEXUS military has been trying to train cloned porpoises to guard the nation’s submerged mining resources. Completing the project requires the Bilby-dominated president to cooperate with the widely hated Catholic Church for the unique services of the Rev. Dr. Liam Jamieson. This scientist/priest has extreme psychic empathy; touching people is emotionally overwhelming for him, and touching animals led him to publish the heretical opinion that beasts have souls and deserve the same rights as humans. At MEXUS’ United Forces Center for Biological Research, Liam has a positive working relationship with Kate Mendoza, a project manager who’s also a member of a burka-wearing, quasi-Catholic sisterhood that protects animals. Mendoza’s work with the dolphins takes a fateful turn with the unforeseen capture of a distressed bottlenose dolphin; the team’s discoveries point to the possibility that sea mammals are not only intelligent, but also have their own religion. This SF tale swims in the sizable wakes of Robert Merle’s 1967 novel Day of the Dolphin and the 1986 hit movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the latter of which featured singing humpback whales that know a bit more about the universe than mankind does. One may also hear echoes of the 1993 film Free Willy as well as the subgenre of novels about ruggedly handsome Catholic priests struggling with sexual desires and yearning for redemption, exemplified by Colleen McCullough’s 1977 bestseller The Thorn Birds and the works of Andrew M. Greeley. Despite this mulligan stew of antecedents, once the author gets past the initial, complex setup—a familiar exploration of the future as a nasty, waterlogged climate change dystopia—the narrative is surprisingly coherent and effective and rendered in a lyrical prose style. The ending doesn’t cheapen the story by leaning on formula; instead, it offers a compelling cast of complex and emotionally stranded characters betrayed by their institutions of government and religion, and their tale, overall, is a haunting one. Readers who agree with the work’s animal rights message and philosophy of sustainability, however, may note that despite the lead characters’ preference for animals over treacherous and greedy humans, none of them seems to have embraced a vegan diet—at least, not yet.
A spiritual SF eco-drama that serves up considerable food for thought after an overly complicated setup.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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