In The Living End, Elkin offered a caustic, hilarious, haunting triptych on the themes of mortality, life-after-death, and God's unabashed injustice. In one of the strongest episodes of the uneven George Mills, he made the process of dying—a terminally ill woman's journey to a Mexican laetrile clinic—into a raucous yet tender black-comedy. But, while the subject-matter here—seven terminally ill English children on an expedition to Disney World—might therefore seem both natural and promising, this is Elkin's weakest novel thus far, with strain and self-consciousness on constant display from beginning (that cumbersome title) to end (an embarrassing finale). The "dream holiday" expedition is the brain-child of Eddy Bale, whose own son Liam died—amid monstrous publicity—from a grisly childhood illness. Eddy raises the money from the British public, starting off with a very small loan from Elizabeth II. (Does she want the fifty quid back? "'Does the pope shit in the woods?' asked the Queen of England.") He chooses the staff for the trip: a manically anti-Semitic doctor; an ex-Royal nanny of warped sexuality; a gay male nurse; and quasi-nurse Mary Cottle, a scarred veteran of aborted loves and pregnancies who has turned exclusively to masturbation. Then the lucky kiddies are selected, ages eight to fifteen, each a pathetic (if unlovable) grotesque: blue-skinned, shrivelled up, deformed by tumors, or drenched in mucus, wheelchaired or crippled, silent or obnoxiously noisy—like Benny Maxine. ("I've got this yid disease. Gaucher's, it's called. I've got this big yid liver, this hulking hebe spleen. I've got this misshapen face and this big bloated belly.") And the trip, as you might expect, is more grim than glorious—though, while the adults pursue their dank/farcical obsessions, the children do find a few fleeting pleasures: spending money; skinny-dipping; spying on Miss Cottle's masturbation sessions; and watching the everyday grotesques—old people—parade by. (Says nurse Colin: "All that soured flesh, all those bitched and bollixed bodies. You see? You see what you thought you were missing?") Unfortunately, however, though the network of themes here—mortality, grotesquerie, existential injustice, the Holocaust—is full of potential, Elkin seems content to decorate a static, undeveloped tableau with verbal filigree: page-long sentences, six-page-long parenthetical remarks, vaudeville-dialogue, interior monologues, fantasy/dream sequences, pilings-up of words that sometimes recall Joyce Carol Oates in their lax, arbitrary excursions. Furthermore, few of these linguistic sideshows have the verve or comic assurance of prime Elkin—partly because they're often pretentious or heavyhanded, partly because the British characters can't benefit from Elkin's genius for American language (his UK dialects are competent at best), partly because Elkin never finds a clear viewpoint or comic tone for this mishmash of surrealism, farce, and bathos. (At the close, after one of the children dies while being harangued by Mickey Mouse, Eddy and Miss Cottle come together in a procreative, pseudo-Joycean porno-mating—defiantly determined to bring yet another grotesque into the world.) Unfunny and unaffecting, difficult yet unrewarding: a novel seemingly modeled on some of William Gass' most iffy precepts—demonstrating that sometimes language-for-it's-own-sake has the power to kill meaning, interest, and emotion.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 156478259X
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1985
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
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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