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Spinners
A UFO sighting disrupts life in a small New Zealand town
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Spinners
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By Anthony McCarten
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William Morrow
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$24.00
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Hardcover, Feb. 1999
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ISBN 0-688-16303-3
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Review by Clinton Lawrence
 ixteen-year-old Delia Chapman has not only seen a spaceship, she has been taken aboard one in Spinners, the first novel by New Zealand playwright Anthony McCarten. But when pressed for details by the only police officer in Opunake, New Zealand--a man named Harvey Watson--she can provide few. Harvey concludes she's lying, but he is unable to dissuade her from her story as he gives her a ride home. Later that night, he reveals the incident to his wife, on the condition that she keep it to herself. The next morning, of course, she tells the first person she sees, the milkman. Before the morning is over, the whole town has heard.
Delia, like most of her friends, has a summer job at Borthwick's Freezing Works, a local meat-packing plant. There, her friends confront her and ask about the sighting. She claims not only to have been taken on board, but to have had sex with the aliens. Meanwhile, word has reached one of the leading national tabloids, which has sent a reporter to check on the story, and one of the local farmers discovers a strange circle burned into his barley field. In its center lies a flattened cow. Delia hasn't told her abusive father about the spaceship, and when he sees the story in the tabloid, he beats her severely for bringing derision on the family name.
The strange incidents are just beginning, however. Delia's cousin, Yvonne McKay, is pregnant, but claims she's never had sex. Then Delia finds out she too is pregnant. Delia's father, who wants her to have an abortion, tells her she has to leave if she's going to keep the baby, something she is insisting upon.
More satire than science fiction
Spinners is more a satire of small-town life with a fantastic element thrown in than a science fiction novel, and it's a quite enjoyable one. McCarten has created an impressive ensemble of quirky characters and a vivid setting. As a consequence, the book--even with its darker aspects--is often quite funny. McCarten is also a master when it comes to evoking details, then using them to set up key plot elements later in the novel. He is quite skillful at revealing the town's darkest secrets and eccentricities in an entertaining and often poignant manner, all with elegance and precision.
As might be expected from a playwright who turns his talents to prose, McCarten's characters are his novel's strongest point. Many of the plot twists revolve around their quirks, which all of the main characters have, including Delia. Particularly in the early stages of Spinners, Delia seems to be an internally sensible person, but one who prefers to withdraw from, and sometimes even resist, external contact and influences. This makes her account of the spaceship even more bizarre, since she's not the type of person who makes up stories to draw attention to herself.
If Spinners has a flaw, it's that, while it's often very funny, the level of humor isn't as consistent as readers might hope for. Sometimes it's obvious McCarten is attempting to make readers laugh, but the attempt falls flat. It's also quite difficult to sustain the humor through some of the novel's darker passages.
Overall, though, Spinners is fine novel. In a book like this, it's obvious that McCarten's experience as a playwright has served him well, and it's quite easy to imagine it on film someday. And while the science fiction content of Spinners is pretty minimal, it's a book that should appeal to those who enjoy the so-called "slipstream" end of the SF spectrum.
I really like this type of literary black comedy anyway, and McCarten has a great deal of talent. I'll be looking for more of his work in the future.
-- Clint
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Double Full Moon Night
One man struggles for survival at the mercy of powerful aliens
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Double Full Moon Night
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By Gentry Lee
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Edited by Dale L. Walker
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Bantam Books
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$23.95/$32.95 Canada
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Hardcover, March 1999
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ISBN 0-553-09007-0
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Review by A.M. Dellamonica
 ouble Full Moon Night is Gentry Lee's first solo novel set in Arthur C. Clarke's Rama Universe, and it's also the sequel to Bright Messengers, which he co-wrote with Clarke. The book is a continuation of the story of Johann Eberhart, an engineer abandoned on a tropical island within an extraterrestrial worldlet of mysterious origin.
In Bright Messengers, Johann's companion was Sister Beatrice, a priestess-bishop he had fallen in love with on Mars, prior to their journey into the alien worldlet. Now Johann is raising the daughter Beatrice left behind when she died during childbirth. With no other company at hand, he attempts to educate Maria in the ideals and ideas of the human race. After the pair spend eight years alone, predators called nozzlers begin to menace the island. Their encroachment eventually forces Johann and Maria to set out in a boat in search of the Martian colonists who had entered the worldlet with Johann.
Finding the others, however, raises more problems than it solves. Like Johann and Maria, the other survivors are eking out a tenuous existence at the whim of a hostile and capricious environment. Maria finds she is unable to reconcile herself to a larger social sphere, and when Johann marries one of the colonists, the child runs away. Pursuing her exposes Johann to new dangers, including an encounter with a group of primitives who need his help to defeat a predatory creature called an elevark. When they are finally able to return to the colonists' settlement, Johann and Maria find they are on their own again.
This pattern--separation, strangeness and reunion--repeats itself several times over the course of Double Full Moon Night as the worldlet's creators conduct their enigmatic experiment upon Johann and his friends. The drama is played out quietly against a recurring theme--Johann swimming steadily through dark and dangerous waters.
Lee lacks character
Double Full Moon Night is stuffed with unfathomable creatures, danger, strangeness and a sense of human physical frailty in hostile circumstances. The characters are pawns in a game they do not understand, force-marched through crisis after crisis. Readers who enjoy seeing intellects coolly applied to matters of life and death will enjoy watching Johann puzzle out his options time and again.
That said, the book is largely flawed. The prose is dry, reading more like a summary of events than a narrative. The most interesting creatures are barely explored before the characters are whisked on to some new emergency. The sexual dynamics between the characters are dark and disturbing. When the colonists' deaths have left only four survivors--three men and a single young woman--it is assumed that the woman will begin to produce children with the two youngest men. There is no regard for the fact that she is genetically related to her proposed mates and has a parent-child relationship with one. Nobody admits that she probably can't produce enough children to create a sustainable human population under such aversive conditions. Johann simply says it is her duty.
Character is, ultimately, Double Full Moon Night's big problem. Readers are supposed to swim through the oceans of strangeness in this novel with Johann as their life preserver. Unfortunately, Johann is unlikable. He is a hard companion to follow through this extremely complicated story, and most readers will be disappointed with his bad choices, lack of passion and stubborn refusal to regret his mistakes. Though he does grow over the course of the book as he moves from youth to old age, the change is too minimal to be satisfying. He is a man without heart, trapped in a situation with no mercy. It is thus hardly surprising that spending time with him is somewhat painful.
The use of Johann's swimming was inventive, and some of the aliens were cool, but too many things happened for no apparent reason. In the end, there was too much loss in this for no payoff at all.
-- A.M.
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