Nobody does it better. But almost nobody even tries.
Smith, grandmaster of the Grand African Adventure, quits his familiar southern haunts for the wastes of the Sudan, where wait the Siege of Khartoum, fates worth than death and more corpses than stars in the heaven.
Fans of the literary novel, if they are ever so rash as to dip into one of Smith’s Super Sagas (The Blue Horizon, 2003, etc.), are likely to swoon under the onslaught of the old-fashioned writing. So many similes. So many metaphors. It’s just not done. Not these days. And yet here they are! “ . . . her voice quivered like the strings of a lute plucked by skilled finger.” “When he stood naked she rose and stepped back to admire him.” “ ‘You bring me vast treasure, lord.’ ” Political correctness? Forget it. General “Chinese” Gordon, doomed commandant of the city at the forks of the Nile, may be a little crazy, but he’s English, so he’s honest and the crazed hordes across the Nile, who wait to rape and sack Khartoum, that isolated outpost of the Empire, are Less Than Human. The Muslim holy man stirring the tribes to murderous passion is a cynical despoiler of women. And the scenes of elephant slaughter! Gads! Who still reads this stuff? And yet . . . Smith’s way with a story always prevails. Stick with him through the outrageous plot he has spun around the real-life siege and you will be riding on the fleetest camels, running nearly naked beside the finest horses, sitting in on serial defilements of a Valiant English Woman who finds pleasure on the very first try, and you will get sucked into what the movies used to call sweeping Cinemascope adventure and, like that ravished young lady, you will submit. You’ll learn a little bit about the Sudan and its wretched history and, in the end, you’ll see the coming of Modernity, and you will, like Smith, in his own way, find it disturbing and wrong. And you will have had a few good hours away from the current intractable Imperial crisis.
Nobody does it better. But almost nobody even tries.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-31840-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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