From Publishers Weekly
In one of Picador's first hardcover titles, Ballard (Crash) offers another of his tautly imagined experiments with 20th-century pathology. Here he traces an environmental crusade from its media-driven invasion of a South Seas atomic test site to its establishment of an endangered species' sanctuary, to its metamorphosis into an atavistic cult. Ballard's futuristic characters are nearly always less individual personalities than mutating preoccupations, and this cast of environmental utopians who quixotically strand themselves to save an albatross colony is no exception. Sixteen-year-old Neil Dempsey, who is drawn into the expedition by the charismatic, inscrutable "Dr. Barbara" (Rafferty), is joined by a Hawaiian who dreams of an independent island kingdom, a Boston Brahmin missionary, an animal-rightist airline stewardess and a band of German eco-hippies. Amid Ballard's hallucinatory evocation of the island's native flora, imported endangered fauna and abandoned military and scientific installations, Dr. Barbara proves ready to sacrifice anything or anyone for her unstable cause, whether to the international media, the island jungle or her artificial paradise. Although the naive and uncertain Neil proves a comparatively weak narrative lens for Dr. Barbara and her spiraling projects, Ballard's story moves tensely along, an apocalyptic cautionary tale for the millennium.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Jonathan Oliver's excellent narration is wasted on this tale of an ecological mission gone awry. Dr. Barbara, banned from medicine for practicing euthanasia, establishes a sanctuary for endangered species on a remote Pacific island. Neil, a fatherless 16-year-old, joins Barbara's project because he hopes "perhaps Dr. Barbara can protect me as well as the albatross." Neil is the doctor's most loyal follower, even when he discovers that she has resumed practicing euthanasia on healthy but bothersome members of the mission. The doctor also abandons the facade of running a sanctuary and focuses instead on her true desireAto create a Women's Republic that requires, for purposes of procreation, a single male. Neil is chosen to sire the next generation, and Barbara soon disposes of all unnecessary males. This depressing story of human savagery essentially goes nowhere and is recommended only where Ballard has a very strong following.ABeth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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