Monday, February 1, 2016

Review: The White Voyage by John Christopher


Genre: Literary Fiction

Description:

Dublin to Dieppe to Amsterdam. A routine trip for the cargo ship Kreya, her Danish crew, and handful of passengers. Brief enough for undercurrents to remain below the surface and secrets to stay buried.

When a violent storm disables the vessel, the crew and passengers are forced to face their humanity and either pull together or face disaster.

Author:

Sam Youd was born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.

As a boy, he was devoted to the newly emergent genre of science-fiction: 'In the early thirties,' he later wrote, 'we knew just enough about the solar system for its possibilities to be a magnet to the imagination.'

Over the following decades, his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels, cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers, light comedies ... In all he published fifty-six novels and a myriad of short stories, under his own name as well as eight different pen-names.

He is perhaps best known as John Christopher, author of the seminal work of speculative fiction,
The Death of Grass (today available as a Penguin Classic), and a stream of novels in the genre he pioneered, young adult dystopian fiction, beginning with The Tripods Trilogy.
Appraisal:

White Voyage’s premise is far from new—place a group of strangers in a life threatening situation and see what happens—yet the author’s prose flowed so smoothly, and his characters felt so true, that I really enjoyed the journey.
The story rolls along at a sedate pace, but even this impatient reader was never tempted to skip-read. The interaction between the characters and the feeling of impending doom that hangs over the novel kept me engaged. I wanted to know who the winners and losers would be. Who would unravel? Who would dig deep and find the will to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles?
And I had to wait until the end to find out—as it should be.

Buy now from:      Amazon US      Amazon UK

FYI:

English spelling.

Format/Typo Issues:

None.

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: Pete Barber

Approximate word count: 70-75,000 words

No comments: