A bold concept poorly executed.
Bombs become people: That’s the premise of this first novel, in which the two U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Japan convert themselves into human survivors.
Little Boy hit Hiroshima, Fat Man Nagasaki; those really were, historically, the bombs’ names. In post-apocalyptic Nagasaki, Fat Man is struggling with birth trauma. He’s a bloated mass, naked and hairless. Little Boy, a runt, finds him in a shelter and decides they are brothers. Among the ruins, Fat Man says, “I think we were put here for a reason.” But what exactly? There’s the rub. Meginnis has created an existential problem for which he has no solution. The novel will dip a toe into various genres (science fiction, magical realism, detective story) without settling into any of them. Thus the brothers impregnate a virgin, a farmer’s daughter, purely through their proximity. Her babies are stillborn; Fat Man kills her enraged father in self-defense. Through a GI, the brothers procure new identities and board a ship for France, where they’re taken in by a married woman. She too, without sexual contact, will bear a child (two-headed). The phenomenon is explained by a Japanese medium. The brothers are haunted by their Japanese victims, who are hoping to be reborn. Not to worry; once the brothers fall in with an American peacenik, a war widow establishing a hotel, there’ll be no more unpleasant births. Fat Man will even make a normal baby with Rosie, the widow. Years later, he’s still a tub of lard and Little Boy’s still a preteen runt, and there’s been no development that might absolve them of their guilt or make them agents of atonement. Meanwhile Meginnis has concocted another storyline involving two French cops pursuing the innocent Fat Man for the murders of pregnant women.
A bold concept poorly executed.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-936787-20-3
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Black Balloon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
The physics of Good Night might be questionable, but the lasting impact on the characters is rather poignant.
Alice in Wonderland meets The Shining when four travelers are stranded in Good Night, Idaho, during a freak blizzard.
There is something seductive about the Travelers Rest hotel. For Julia Addison, it is settling into an oddly familiar bed in the hotel and dreaming, beyond worry about her husband and son. And for her husband, Tonio, there is a mysterious blonde woman in silver shoes whom he follows, leaving their son, Dewey, behind. Dewey is unimpressed by this strange hotel in this strange town where the snow never seems to stop falling. Sure, he receives more chocolate pie than he could ever eat from the rough but sympathetic owners of the diner, but the novelty of having no parents to whom he must report quickly wears thin. And then there’s Uncle Robbie, fresh from rehab, who looks at the whole adventure as a chance to go on the binge of a lifetime and finally cut ties with his responsible older brother. Mostly they flit in and out of their separate experiences that seem to take place in varying times and places, though occasionally one character will catch a ghostly glimpse of another. As the truth begins to come out about Good Night’s history and the Addisons’ role in it, there is ultimately a rather satisfactory answer to most of the mystery and questions and flashbacks. Morris (Call It What You Want, 2010, etc.) insists on using epigraphs from Proust throughout the book, which detracts from rather than adds to the novel’s own illustration of the themes of memory and reality. Though a bit slow to begin, because the characters find themselves lost before we even get to know them, the novel gradually proves itself weighty, suspenseful, and even wistful.
The physics of Good Night might be questionable, but the lasting impact on the characters is rather poignant.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-33582-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Despite an overall lack of focus, Bernard’s tale still manages to retain a mournful, prophetic power.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and nobody feels fine in Bernard’s debut portrayal of humanity’s end.
Near the middle of the 23rd century, Earth is on the edge of complete environmental collapse. The human race has dwindled to a few straggling colonies on the edges of each continent, and there’s just one shining hope left: the 32,000 colonists on the starship Apeiron, a last-ditch effort to start anew on an “exoplanet” more than 50 light-years away. The narrator of Bernard’s novel—Patrick, a senior member of the colony on America’s East Coast and a former astronomer—stays in communication with the other colonies. As they begin to slide toward oblivion, he decides to take a dangerous trip to a large radio-telescope array and find out the status of Apeiron’s mission—a voyage that offers revelations that Patrick might have been happier not knowing. As a jeremiad against human-caused environmental damage, Bernard’s novel is often effective, working details of the biosphere’s destruction into the overall flow without holding up the narrative. Like other ecological end-time novels, such as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (2006) and Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka’s Nature’s End (1986), Bernard carefully describes what a world in the last throes of extinction might look like and shows its effects on human society, from desperate attempts to use what remains of national park systems to riots over food and water to ever-increasing swarms of refugees. However, Bernard’s novel also shares a common flaw with other, similar stories: its emphasis on worldbuilding over character development. Only Patrick appears to be fully fleshed out, serving as a beacon of reason and compassion in a world that’s seemingly run out of both. The story mainly uses the other colonists as a Greek chorus of despair, fear, and animal panic. Once the focus shifts to a book-within-a-book—a memoir of a woman who had a child with the Apeiron mission’s leader, but couldn’t go with him—the excess worldbuilding only becomes more pronounced, diffusing the novel’s focus and derailing the momentum. Patrick’s somber elegy at the end manages to preserve the power of his final words, but it underlines the relative weakness of the preceding memoir sections.
Despite an overall lack of focus, Bernard’s tale still manages to retain a mournful, prophetic power.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68222-404-5
Page Count: 460
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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