A slightly contrived but ultimately enjoyable thriller set in the shadowy world of medical experimentation.
An American expatriate in Thailand stumbles on a doctor’s bizarre genetic experiments in this debut novel.
After widower Benton Sims retired from his career as a Washington, D.C., intelligence analyst, he decided to move to Thailand. He spends his days hanging around the expat pub in Prajawan, drinking margaritas, swapping stories with the local transplants, and pining for his dead wife, Sylvia. There, he watches Siri perform; she’s the frontwoman of the Exploding Heads who hails from a tribal village in the Golden Triangle. Then, out of the blue, Siri disappears. Benton learns the rock singer had been a critic of the drug trials conducted among her people, the marginalized Palin, and that this has forced her to go underground. Benton seeks out Pierre Montha Bulsani, the physician who conducted the trials, but he unwittingly becomes a test subject himself. As the drugs begin to change Benton in strange and unexpected ways, he is drawn ever deeper into Pierre’s mysterious realm, where dead people turn out to be alive, the living are in danger of becoming dead, and the full, terrible potential of Thailand’s hidden plants may unlock the ancient, untapped potential of humanity. So much for a quiet retirement on the beach. Mani tells his story in taut, highly descriptive prose, capturing his Thai setting’s cornucopia of sights and tastes: One character sees “clusters of pimpled red lichees whose insides he remembered as soft and translucent, tangy-sweet and throat-tickling, and next to them were their scrumptious cousins the dumpling-like longans, and then bunches of thorny rambutans, their flavor acrid like over-ripened grapes.” The players are given elaborate backstories, and the thriller’s interests are varied and ambitious. Even so, the plot feels a bit shapeless at times, as though the author is trying to cram a lot of distinct components into one slightly cumbersome structure. But fans of more literary-tinged genre offerings like those of Chris Abani or John le Carré will enjoy Benton’s strange—even phantasmagoric—adventures in Thailand. Replete with questions regarding medical ethics and technologies, the book serves as the first volume of a trilogy.
A slightly contrived but ultimately enjoyable thriller set in the shadowy world of medical experimentation.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950743-10-0
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2019
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
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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