A compelling, spare story that portrays its ugly, oil-disaster future as crude in more ways than one.
In a world ravaged by cataclysmic oil blowouts, a vagrant survivor witnesses the cruelties of a degraded civilization in Cheney’s (So I Can See the Trees, 2013) dystopian novel.
In 2031, members of a messianic terrorist group called CRUD simultaneously blow up oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico and across Canada, unleashing an extinction-level flood of petroleum. It wipes out much of civilization, at least in North America, ushering in a new, literal dark age as pollutant-saturated clouds blot out the sun. Earthquakes are frequent, respiratory disease is rampant, and oil is everywhere. The stripped-down prose in this novel follows Bird, a nondescript everyman-survivor with no special agenda or aim as he wanders the wastes, tangling often with the results of “Stadium Culture,” a brute-jock version of society. Here, city-center sports arenas comprise the last organized community, where tuneless marching bands are part of the elite and the main activities are continual public executions (via impaling) and death matches against maddened woolly mammoths—a species revived from the ancient past by genetic engineering, right before everything went wrong. At one point, a sadistic, pinheaded boss is also described as being genetically modified—part of a botched attempt to create a master race. Bird, whose most distinguishing feature as a character is that he isn’t driven by nonstop urges to hurt people, briefly becomes the companion/protector of a mystery woman and an infant. Overall, the ecologically-minded author Cheney offers a grim, dystopic narrative that takes a page from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. It will likely remind many readers of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), with its terse, semi-poetic descriptions, often of unspeakable violence, in a nihilistic, post-apocalyptic world. Although the caricatures of Red-Staters verge on deadpan satire, the minimal storyline doesn’t overstay its welcome. Indeed, it even shows signs of being an allegory in which a bruised and abused Earth finally turns on the Homo sapiens who have caused it so much pain.
A compelling, spare story that portrays its ugly, oil-disaster future as crude in more ways than one.Pub Date: April 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-72523-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: The Cabin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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