Someone with a name like Xeno Atlas is bound to be the kind of guy who becomes obsessed with a book lost for approximately 700 years. Namely, a book that – as detailed in Nicholas Christopher’s THE BESTIARY – is a comprehensive encyclopedia of all the mythologized animals who didn’t make the cut onto Noah’s ark: hydra, griffins, chimera, phoenix and the like.
Xeno spends years and travels the world trying the locate the lone copy, assuming such a tome still exists. But don’t mistake this for a breakneck, pulse-pounding thriller, because in THE BESTIARY, the primary search is not Xeno finding a book, but Xeno finding himself.
I suspect many of you just lost interest, but the first 50 pages of this novel hover around amazing, if depressing. As a child, Xeno lives his emotionally nonexistent seaman father and his loving maternal grandmother, with his mother having died giving birth to him. Xeno believes his father resents him for it, and while unspoken, the distaste is palpable. There’s no love, no bond.
Xeno also has few friends, and poverty and death envelope the story of his childhood in all its Dickensian misery. It certainly won’t make you feel good — quite the opposite — but at least the boy’s plight moves you.
Unfortunately, as Xeno grows up and loses his innocent nature, so, too, did my interest in him. A stint in Vietnam, dabbling with heavy drugs, banging granola chicks – the book gets politicized and mired in hippie-movement doctrine as he becomes less and less sympathetic. The other good, noble characters we loved early on either drop out, die or become just plain mean, making our time with them equally displeasurable.
And what of the book hunt? Exactly. It’s a MacGuffin, essentially – a metaphorical excuse to label the book as a literary adventure rather than just literary.
That’s a shame, too, because just based upon the first sixth of the novel, I was prepared to shortlist it as one of 2007′s best. Now, it’s just disappointing. Christopher is an excellent writer who can craft sentences that crush the heart, but the woe-is-me/coming-of-age/angst angle is just too darn tired, especially when you cease to empathize with your narrator. –Rod Lott
Related posts:
- The Xeno Solution
- The World of Jules Verne
- PlagueMaker
- Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World
- The Mark of Zorro
