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
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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