- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd; First Edition edition (Oct 1986)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0241119480
- ISBN-13: 978-0241119488
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,906,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
12 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Great SF from a 'serious' writer
4 Jan 2000
Format:Hardcover
Another surprise from a writer who keeps reinventing his art, O-Zone is a book about the future we fear, but filled with characters we know and can relate to. Theroux's greatest talent, it seems to me, is the authority with which he creates the various worlds he presents in his novels. From the jungles of the Amazon, to big city melodrama, to the fantasy tale of Millroy the Magian or the harsh reality of The Family Arsenal, he presents characters and situations that seem too real to be mere inventions. In O-Zone he tackles the SF genre and does it in style. An almost picaresque tale of a journey into a forbidden desolate 'outback', by charaters unfitted by wealth and easy living to deal with what they find, Theroux's story deals with a range of social and human issues with both excitement and humor.
This book, like so much of Theroux, can be read strictly for fun or delved into for deeper meaning. All in all, another very satisfying fiction from one of our best contemporary writers.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Excellent drama against a sci-fi backdrop
15 Dec 2003
Format:Hardcover
O-Zone is a rather unusual book for Paul Theroux, a drama in a futuristic setting rather than the contemporary setting of his other novels. Reading O-Zone brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World, both for the portrayal of the world in which it is set, and for the inevitible comparison with another noted novelist who wrote a single book set in a futuristic world.
I've noticed that Sci-Fi fans as a group don't much care for O-Zone, as it violates a lot of the accepted rules of the genre- as does Brave New World, for that matter, and Huxley has never been that popular with hard core SciFi readers either. Both books use the future world as a setting to explore relationships between people, and to make certain plot developments possible, but neither gets into much detail regarding the technology.
Like Brave New World, O-Zone explores the alienation of modern man in this world of the future, and the consequant attraction to the primative and atavistic world that is found on the reservation (Huxley) or in the contaminated lands of the O-Zone. And in both books, some of the protagonists go in search of amusement and entertainment from the primatives, but find something disturbingly similar to themselves.
Despite the strong parallels, O-Zone owes nothing in the way of plot of development to Brave New World. The story is as original as anything Theroux's written, the characters are fully developed and well motivated, and the story compelling.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Haunting and Imaginative
5 Jan 2010
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I've never read any other books by Paul Theroux, who seems to get compared to Updike a lot, but I've enjoyed his longform journalism and he is as good at writing dystopian, near-future sci-fi as anyone I've run across. The book captures a society ruled by xenophobia perfectly, as well as the viciousness of people to whom mob mentality is a sort of hobby. The small cultural/sartorial/technological details of the book are mostly pretty good, with ideas that are often believable (e.g., women go to brothels where the masked sperm donors have sex with them, and people can sort of accept this because it's done for the sake of having super-smart children). The contrasts between the isolated, tiered cities and the stone-age countryside is done skillfully and unnervingly, and the sense of dread the city dwellers seem to have when out of their cities is conveyed with genuine tension. Life among the "aliens" in the O-Zone as a flipside shows people that are as complex and multifaceted as anyone, not simply played off as noble savages or outlaws. The characters, from a murderous posse member, to a stern tribal leader, to a precocious social misfit, to a wealthy business and the teenage "alien" whom he becomes infatuated with and abducts,are all believable; Theroux doesn't show us people at their best, but rather driven by familiar and often conflicting urges and traits. Dialogue is fairly bizarre but works within the book's social context and is handled well, with offhand remarks and observations often being intensely insightful. A very good book if you don't mind it being a total freakin' downer and have any interest in near-future sci-fi.
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