IF YOU WANT TO READ A MEDICAL THRILLER THIS WEEK TURN TO THE MAESTRO OF MEDICAL THRILLERS — ROBIN COOK’S NEW NOVEL INVASION
If you are a fan of Robin Cook, the doctor turned novelist whose medical thrillers have educated us about the medical processes going on in our bodies, the new novel comes as an expected one. After all if you have read his books, from Coma to Mutation to Fatal Cure to Godplayer to the forgettable ones like Fever and Brain, it was bound to happen: the invasion from outer space. Surely when the good doctor would run out of earthly sources of the creepers and bugs and other evil doctors who profited from deadly contagion carefully spread by them, the plot had to go out into space.
The book is a typical potboiler and makes one read really fast more to see how the illusion of fiction is maintained than any real insight into human nature with or without deadly viruses. The story of the teenager’s transformation from healthy carefree book-toting student to creepy alien is not very convincing to people who have seen creepier changes in Nightmares on Elm Street. Recommended to Cook’s fans only.
BUT IF YOU WANT TO ENTER THE WORLD OF MAGICAL REALISM READ ISABELLE ALLENDE’S PAULA
A very far cry from the violence of Robin Cook is the cool refreshing bedside of the autobiographical novel by one of Marquez’s protégé, Isabelle Allende. Anyone who has enjoyed The House of the Spirits — that masterpiece of evocation— will love this one. As the little girl gets more and more seriously ill, the mother relates the story of her own life in great detail in a sort of a letter which is a rich stream of memories and digressions and spin-offs and accounts of mixed motives and mixed-up loves we all wade through and are unable to ever give up. PAULA is a book to be savoured, to be enjoyed for its lilting passages marked on first reading to be re-read again and then quietly thought about. It is a book I would recommend with the same line with which a friend introduced me to Allende’s works: “ I envy you the joy of first reading this!”