The writing throughout is masterly, but readers have come to expect that from Wiggins. But whereas Golding simply plunked readers down immediately on his island with Ralph, Piggy and the others, Wiggins builds slowly to her central act of horror, making the first half of her novel both an account of a lonely woman finding love and a satirical group portrait of British colonials and their entourages. John Dollar is also a novel that will inevitably be compared to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, since its second half focuses on the moral degeneration of a group of marooned English schoolchildren, this time young girls. Nearly every page talks about eating or hunger, starting with the deprivations of its heroine, Charlotte Lewes, in post-World War I England and ending with a heart-rending act of cannibalism on a deserted tropical island. That's something of an inside joke, because John Dollar rivals a James Beard cookbook in its obsession with food. $17.95 MARIANNE WIGGINS' new novel is so good that most readers will want to devour it in one gulp. JOHN DOLLAR By Marianne Wiggins Harper & Row.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |