Tremain's latest starts slowly but gathers emotional speed and literary power: an entrancing, highly satisfying read.
English author Tremain (Restoration, 1990, etc.) returns triumphantly to the 20th century, sketching the outwardly stunted postwar lives of a dozen small-town characters in rural Suffolk- -people whose inner lives, however, are surprising, colorful, sometimes tragic, and drive many of them to a bittersweet, affecting end.
At age six in 1952, Mary Ward—observing a minute of silence for the dead King George IV while standing in a potato field belonging to her brutish father, Sonny, and her dreamy mother, Estelle—suddenly becomes aware that she wishes she were a boy; over the next 30 years, fighting with her hapless brother Timmy, strapping her growing breasts against her chest, falling in love with a neighbor girl named Pearl, running away to her grandfather Cord's house in the wonderful town of Gresham Tears, changing her name to Martin, moving to London, submitting to psychoanalysis, and finally having a sex-change operation and emigrating to Nashville, heroic Mary makes this pressing wish come true. Estelle, lost in a vague dream of her own that eventually leads her to a mental hospital, and Sonny, who becomes a sloppy, suicidal drunk, don't fare as well. But Timmy—who wants to be a pastor rather than a farmer—does; he marries Mary's girlhood love-object Pearl. Eventually, the local homosexual dentist Gilbert, who longs for a swinging life; Walter, Gilbert's first lover, a butcher's son who wants to become a Nashville country music star; and Walker's mother Grace, who buys Sonny Ward's farm after Sonny has killed himself and who grows rich raising chickens—all these and others will get what they secretly need. So, finally, ironically, does even the dead tyrant Sonny—who gets a son to work the land, even though the son is Mary and the land she's working is in Tennessee.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-689-12170-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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