ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607190087
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
Descriptions give mining mystery novel atmosphere
Reviewed by SUSAN TRENT
ROSE. By Martin Cruz Smith. Random House. $25.
Martin Cruz Smith's latest novel, "Rose," is a descriptive and atmospheric mystery evocative of the gold coast of Africa and the unfamiliar world of the small, 19th-century English mining village of Wigan. The main character, Jonathan Blair, yearns to return to Africa after squandering his appropriations money and courting disfavor in England. To redeem himself, he must find the missing Rev. John Maypole, fiance of the daughter of the bishop who owns the Wigan coal mine. Secretive pit girls make Blair's task complicated, and brutish miners make it dangerous. One strength of the novel is the atmosphere Smith creates. Readers feel as if they actually are accompanying Blair around Wigan and delving deep into the coal mine. Smith's detailed descriptions of British weather, the dark, sinister mines and the hardworking Wigan population make the novel authentic and alive.
A second strength is characterization. Blair has led an adventurous life and knows how to handle himself in any situation. Rose, the title character and a pit girl, is as much an adventurer as Blair. Blair's dealings with Charlotte Hannay, the bishop's hostile and reticent daughter, heighten the mystery.
Read "Rose" for its sense of atmosphere, mystery, adventure and romance. The novel creates the lost worlds of imperialist Africa and post-industrial English mining towns in vivid, memorable detail.
Susan Trent lives in Roanoke.
ROSE. By Martin Cruz Smith. Read by Michael York. Abridged. Random House Audiobooks. $23.50.
The audio book requires dedicated concentration at the outset to establish characters and setting because a lot is condensed into short space, but then the story unfolds effectively. Descriptions evoke the shadowy mining world, characters take on definition, and the mystery and romance of the novel are captured. Michael York's mellow voice and accent lend an appropriate tone to the reading.
Mary Ann Johnson is book page editor.
A talk with the author
BY MARY ANN JOHNSON BOOK PAGE EDITOR
The following are excerpts edited from a teleconference interview with Martin Cruz Smith in May about the writing of his novel, "Rose." The transcript was provided by Planned Television Arts of New York.
"I got into this book because, about 15 years ago, I found myself in a dress store shopping with my two daughters, who were then 10 and 11. For lack of anything else to do, I was looking through the magazines and the books and came upon a book about Victorian dress. Way in the back were a couple of pages devoted to the dress of the working class of England. Half of those pages about the working class were about these pit girls of Wigan, describing them as the social scandal of their time. I had never heard of them. But I had heard of Wigan, because when I was a kid, my great hero as a writer was George Orwell. I read everything he wrote. Back in 1937, he'd been given the task of finding the most blighted town in post industrial England, the worst. And he chose Wigan. And suddenly here was this information about these independent, strong-minded women of Wigan who refused to put on dresses, no matter whether Parliament told them to, or the Church told them to, or whoever told them to.
"Also, I found it interesting that the pit girls had become so forgotten.
"Wigan is between Manchester and Liverpool in a fairly bleak part of the north of England. I was very fortunate in connecting with extraordinarily generous souls up there who led me to miners and pit girls - the last living pit girls. And I went down a working mine, went a mile down and a mile laterally underneath the surface, which is an interesting experience for someone with a tinge of claustrophobia.
"So, it was a very complex kind of research - going back into the newspapers of that time, endlessly walking around ... on my own, listening to people, interviewing people. Part of it was osmosis, in which you simply hope that you are going to take in something on another level that isn't written, that's something that just comes through your skin. I go into a situation like that, and I don't know anything. For me to understand it means that by the time I understand it, I can describe it to somebody else. But it is something you cannot describe without having experienced it. The fact that I am willing to parade my ignorance in situations like that is my strongest virtue by far."
Mary Ann Johnson is editor of the book page
Sequel to James Hilton's classic is attempted
Reviewed by CHIP BARNETT
SHANGRI-LA: The Return to the World of Lost Horizon . By Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri. Morrow. $25.
The best part of this novel is that the publisher is using it as an opportunity to reissue "Lost Horizon," which in turn gave me an opportunity to reread James Hilton's 1933 classic.
I can report that the original has held up well with time. The language is dated, but it remains a powerfully moving novel with a good man at its heart, a man torn between perceived duty and spiritual yearnings. Once he has left Shangri-La, an Eden in the frozen depths of Tibet, will it remain heartbreakingly out of his reach?
Hey, no big deal according to the authors of this new pseudo-sequel. It's 1966 now. Sure he made it back with no problem, and he's a wise-cracking regular guy fighting off the evil Chinese who have invaded Tibet and are out to destroy its culture. Yeah, he falls in love with a young Chinese woman, but whoa - duty calls and all that.
Talk about a sequel eviscerating the spirit of the original. Stick with "Lost Horizon."
Chip Barnett is a Rockbridge County librarian.
No revolutionary discoveries await
Reviewed by PAUL DELLINGER
THE END OF SCIENCE. By John Horgan. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. $24.
Maybe it's the nearness of the millennium, but John Horgan, a senior writer for Scientific American, makes the argument in this book that we are nearing the limits of science in every field from astronomy and physics to biology and even social science. He does not say no more scientific discoveries await us, but that they will be more of the filling-in-the-blanks type of discoveries within theories already conceived and verified. Besides, he says, scientific research is getting too expensive to continue growing forever. He gives the example of the 1993 congressional decision to halt funding for the supercollider.
The obvious rebuttal to all this is ... well, they thought exactly the same thing at the close of the last century. Poor Charles Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office, will be remembered mainly for his unfortunate comment in 1899 that everything that can be invented already has been. Horgan could be in for similar remembrances as we move into the 21st century.
Regardless of how you feel about his theses, this is a fascinating book because of Horgan's interviews with key scientists in a variety of fields. The reader gets firsthand accounts of Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and many others from Horgan's own impressions and descriptions of them. He lets them speak in their own voices, apparently having made judicious use of a tape recorder, but he is also selective about his quotes. The result is a look into the lives, attitudes, beliefs and researches (not to mention idiosyncrasies) of some of the people whose work is shaping the world in which we live.
The end of science? Maybe. But certainly not the end of good journalism about scientists and their ideas.
Paul Dellinger has had short stories published in Wheel of Fortune (Avon Books) and The Williamson Effect (Tor Books), both edited by Roger Zelazny.
BOOKMARKS
Reviewed by LYNN ECKMAN
A SOUL TO TAKE. By Lynn Eckman. Onyx. $5.50.
A frightening, bone-chilling thriller, "A Soul to Take" proves an auspicious debut for Christiansburg teacher and preacher, C.N. Bean. His knowledge of police procedures and of human frailties rings true, enhancing this psychological novel about a serial killer who preys on young boys.
Rita Trible, who serves as head of Wisconsin's Criminal Investigation Division, is shocked and horrified by the butchery of the slayings, which are described with gruesome detail.
Trible uncovers the unsavory past of two suspects, yet she feels that neither has committed the ghoulish deeds. Her failure to arrest anyone causes more problems for her personally and for the department.
Bean keeps readers riveted to this tale, revealing only at the end the monster responsible for the carnage. Anyone who likes being scared while in a safe armchair will turn the pages more and more quickly during the final scenes of madness and mayhem, which build to a surprising conclusion.
C.N. Bean teaches at Virginia Tech. With two more works scheduled for release soon, Bean seems assured of success and critical acclaim in the genre he has chosen and progress in his hope of eliminating such heinous crimes.
Lynn Eckman teaches at Roanoke College
Biography of author Kosinski is compelling
Reviewed by JOHN A. MONTGOMERY
JERZY KOSINSKI: A Biography. By James Park Sloan. Dutton. $27.95.
Not quite a household name, but an eminent author nonetheless, Jerzy Kosinski rocked the literary world when he committed suicide in 1991.
A Polish-Jewish immigrant who endured the tyrannical atrocities of Hitler and Stalin before coming to American in the 1950s, Kosinski also overcame severe language and financial barriers to bask in success. He learned English, mastered its nuances and wrote beautiful prose. He married into money and had women by the score. He was admired by the intellectual set and yet maintained his friends from the underground. Kosinski seemed invincible.
Kosinski authored a number of novels, including the widely-acclaimed "The Painted Bird" and "Being There," the latter of which was converted into a Peter Sellers film. He made frequent appearances on "The Tonight Show" and counted among his acquaintances such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, Roman Polanski and Warren Beatty.
An expose which appeared in the Village Voice in 1982 questioned Kosinski's veracity, suggesting that ghostwriting and plagiarism were prevalent in his works. A man who had dodged death his entire life, Kosinski never recovered from this final blow.
James Park Sloan (a National Book Award finalist) is a gifted writer in his own right, and he knew Kosinski for more than 20 years. Sloan's lucent writing (combined with a compelling subject) makes for a very good read.
Ultimately, Sloan concludes that the truth lies somewhere between the claims of Kosinski and his detractors. But watching Kosinski defy the odds time and again, the reader wants to grant him amnesty.
John A. Montgomery is the president of the Blue Ridge Writers Conference.
Can we live as long as Noah?
Reviewed by SIDNEY BARRITT
REVERSING HUMAN AGING. By Michael Fossel, Ph.D., M.D. William Morrow Co. $25.
We will all live a lot longer than our customarily allotted three-score-and-ten or even the 120 years that Genesis suggests can be ours. Maybe we can even reach the heroic spans of Noah and Methuselah. Fossel thinks that goal is well within our reach in the foreseeable future. Of course, all the degenerative ailments that currently limit us will vanish along the way.
How is this to be? The key lies in the telomere, the very end of our chromosomes. Our understanding of the work of this piece of genetic material is very new, but it appears that the length of the telomere controls the longevity of the individual cell. Slowing the rate at which the telomere shortens would, in theory, allow the individual cell and ultimately, the entire body to live longer.
The whole hypothesis is intriguing, and it may prove useful or even true. For now, it is a shaky foundation on which to construct the edifice of this book. It is also too small a foundation for a book of this length; a feature magazine article would have been the right venue for such speculation.
Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.
LENGTH: Long : 219 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Smithby CNB