An era-hopping first novel takes a lovelorn London curator on an escape to the future via an H.G. Wellian time machine—only to find humankind not at home. Canadian Wright (Stolen Continents, 1992, etc.), born in England, builds on his award-winning nonfiction and travel writing in this fast-forward fantasy. Though it's long since ended, the romance of curator David Lambert with enigmatic archaeologist Anita has been the defining experience in his life- -until a letter from Wells himself falls into his hands, leading him to be there when the time machine makes its fiery return in the first moments of the new millennium. Keeping his find of the machine secret, David works feverishly to understand and modernize it, spurred on in his desire to surge ahead by a chance reading of Anita's obituary (dead of mysterious causes at age 32) and by his own illness, diagnosed as mad-cow disease. Brought forward a half-millennium in a flash, he arrives in a now- tropical England and discovers London burned and overtaken by the jungle. David sets off for Edinburgh, hopeful that some people can be found in the cooler Highlands, keeping a journal all the while in which he ruminates about his former life with Anita and Bird, her other lover and his best friend. Still farther north, a herd of llamas leads him at last to the human contact he's so craved. Imprisoned and treated with suspicion at first, since he's fair-skinned and everyone else is black, David persuades his captor, Laird Macbeth, that he's harmless. Ultimately, he learns the fate of civilization, but not before renewed suspicions among Macbeth's devoutly Christian folk compel him to play Christ in a literal reenactment of the Crucifixion. Vividly elegiac in style and enveloping enough in its mystery, but for long stretches this remains a one-man roadshow- -and suffers from a lack of substance in the supporting cast.
Pub Date: March 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18172-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
An attention-getting writer (novels, Memento Mori. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and short stories, The Go-Away Bird) pursues her multi-personae interests, her concern with religion, and her refusal to allow the reader to be at one with her purpose. Here she disperses her story (a loose but provocative thing) over an extended — and interrupted — period (thirty years) during which Miss Brodie, (in her prime) holds young minds in thrall, at first in delight at the heady freedom she offers from the rigid, formal precepts of Edinburgh's Marcia Blaine (day) School, later in loyalty to her advanced sedition against the efforts to have her removed. Finally the girls grow up — and Monica, Rose, Eunice, Jenny, Mary, and Sandy, (particularly Sandy with her pig-like eyes) separate, and the "Brodie set" dissolves- with war, death, marriage, career, and conversion to Catholicism. But there still is a central focus — who among them betrayed Miss Brodie to the headmistress so that a long-desired dismissal was effective? In this less-than-a-novel, more-than-a-short story, there is the projection of a non-conformist teacher of the thirties, of a complex of personalties (which never becomes personal lives), and of issues which, floating, are never quite tangible. But Muriel Spark is sharp with her eyes and her ears and the craftiness of her craftsmanship is as precision-tooled as the finest of her driest etching. With the past record, the publisher's big push, and The New Yorker advance showing, this stands on its own.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1961
ISBN: 0061711292
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1961
Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair.
Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect(1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools countrywide.
In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: He murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come.
Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair.Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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