Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Are you a useful idiot too?, 14 April 2004
By A Customer
Useful Idiots are people who think that what they do is for the best, not realizing that it is for someone else's best. As it turns out, most people in Jan Mark's new novel - Useful Idiots - are useful idiots, the pawns of unscrupulous people, which makes the novel is a truly pessimistic book.
We know that Jan Mark never makes it easy for her readers, especially at the end of her novels. The reader is forced to think and draw his or her own conclusions, however reluctant he or she may be. This is also the case in this spell-binding story, of the same category as The Eclipse of the Century, so much more than just a crossover or "kidult" novel. It is a fantasy that needs some time to get going - as it carefully creates a new world - but when the first 100 pages have been processed, it absorbs the reader to a point that it haunts him (or her?) during the night.
It is a fantasy that must be based on detailed research. I can imagine the writer with maps on her desk showing which parts of Europe could be flooded in 2255 and which would not. I do not have to look up information about the tabanus bovinus rex to know that what she writes about this insect must have been thoroughly researched. Realizing this when you are reading, in fact realizing that what you are reading could one day be true, makes Jan Mark's fantasies even more appealing.
As a European it is interesting to be confronted with the question of federalism versus nationalism, and all its implications. Also in this field the novel really makes you think
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A soggy, muddy story, 28 April 2006
This book bursts with the squelch and mud of the Fens, written in a spell-binding fashion that lingers with the reader long after the pages are closed. Although this is a book for young adults, older readers will find it very good as well. The Fens are invoked very well, the emptiness, the mud, the water all seep out of the page. I particularly liked the hero Korda as he is more like an ordinary person, vulnerable and manipulated, rather than the traditional sci-fi trash action hero. I also found Jan Mark's ideas on national identity and archeology very interesting. This is a tale of manipulation, dressed up in the dark gothic of the Fens. The future world is very different to most we are presented with, one without spaceships and silly aliens, more focussed upon human characters. The Global Warming Jan Mark presents is all too plausible and thankfully steers clear of a lot of the more unrealistic ideas. All in all a very good read.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A recurring problem with Ms Mark's books ..., 18 Aug 2009
I was sufficiently intrigued by Jan Mark's `The Ennead' when I read it as a child to return again as an adult. Unfortunately, having since read a couple of the author's more recent works, Eclipse of the Century and Useful Idiots, I have to conclude that Ms Mark had a problem - one that can affect the entire male sex (if the adverts are to be believed) as well as writers. There's no easy or polite way to put it. It's the premature climax.
Jan Mark's books are different, interesting, long enough to flesh out characters and environment. In Useful Idiots we have the skeleton of a man discovered on a beach in the RDI - Rhinish Delta Islands (or what's left of GB after Global Warming, civil war and the great virus have had their way with it - no wonder the Flemings liked her books). A conspiracy is unearthed along with the body, and the book's protagonist, archaeologist Merrick Korda, experiences various life-threatening trials to keep us interested until we get to the ending and then it's as if Ms Mark couldn't care. She got bored, contracted writers block, or maybe the tax man was hammering at the door and her publisher was demanding the final copy. Either way, this book does not justify the time invested in reaching its conclusion. Read it, if you must, just don't read the final chapter. It's not about comfort - as any regular re-reader of the Silmarillion will tell you - only I find little point to reading this book considering the brief, shallow ending tacked on the back.
Eclipse of the Century is another case in point. It ambles about for a while, draws us in, fools us about the Sturyat, then peters out like a damp squib. There's a quotation from Philip Pullman on the front cover: `Read it and be amazed'. At what? I suspect Mr Pullman was reading a different book. Perhaps one of his own tiresome progeny.
As to the reading audience these two books are aimed at, I can't imagine a teenager picking one up nowadays. After all, it's not written by a reality TV-star so why bother ...
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