Customer Reviews

The Second Angel

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Author Phillip Kerr has written some amazingly diverse stories over the years, from the Phillip Marlowe-meets-the-Third Reich Berlin Noir trilogy to the high tech horror of "The Grid." Set in the year 2069, "Second Angel" is Kerr's stab at Near Bad Future science fiction. Unfortunately, it falls way short of expectations. Kerr is a master at creating memorable characters and scenes. This time out, however, his story is populated by a group of people who fail to generate much interest (even his main villian is just your standard issue bad guy and is bumped off well before the climax).

The backdrop against which the story is set has some interesting aspects. There's a computer generated assistant who is also a marital aid as well as a deadly Aids-like virus that has infected over 80% of the Eath's population, making unifected blood a commodity more valuable than gold. The polt, however, unfolds slowly, stalls and never really regain momentum. Annoying grammatical embellishments like the numerous footnotes (bizarre in a work of fiction) and the "author-narrator" repeatedly injecting himself into the story serve mainly as irritating distractions.

Overall, this is a disappointing work from an author who has produced many excellent works in the past.

I am rarely so incensed by a book that I feel obligated to warn the reading public to stay away. My main objection is the way Mr. Kerr spreads his ignorance of mathematics and science to the public, like P2 for the intellect. This was touted as a scientifically sophisticated book but the science was so bad it ruined what little story there was.

I received the hardcover version as a gift. On the inner dust jacket they cite Mr. Kerr as having "encyclopedic intelligence". The back of the dust jacket has a blurb from Esquire saying this book "assaults your ignorance". It certainly does. Unless you can withstand Mr. Kerr's deadly assault on your knowedge base you are certainly more ignorant after you finish it than when you started out.

I didn't see any of the usual acknowledgements by an author citing valuable discussions with experts. All I can figure based on what I saw in this book is that either: (1) none were consulted, or (2) when they saw the finished product they asked to have their names taken off in embarrassment.

Some of the mistakes were mundane misnomers: "glutenate" for the neurotransmitter glutamate.

The worst problem is that the entire premise of the book rests on the naive concept that a blood-borne viral infection could be cured by a simple exchange transfusion. Gosh, why haven't we done that for AIDS? Let's all collectively smack ourselves on the forehead, then call the CDC and tell them what Kerr has figured out.

The vision of the future is faulty. Even if you stipulate all the quasi-science of the P2 virus and its cure, the resulting societal changes Kerr posits don't make sense. Marrow-stimulating drugs easily available today (such as erythropoietin that increase red cell production, and neupogen which stimulates white cell production) should have been very popular for those infected with P2. If donors used these drugs, they could yield even more units per year. I figure a healthy donor could cure one diseased person per year.

Care for more?

Phil flunks genetics 101 by getting heterozygotes and homozygotes backwards. Dallas and Aria are described as "homozygous" for thalassemia. If so, they would have the disease. In order for their child Caro to have the disease with two healthy parents, the parents had to be asymptomatic and HETEROZYGOUS, each contributing one recessive gene that then expressed the disease in their symptomatic HOMOZYGOUS daughter.

I am a physician who has practiced hyperbaric medicine. The hyperbaric stuff was laughable. Dallas has a sensation of extreme pressure, that forced the blood to the back of his body. Acceleration might do that (e.g., if you were in one of those giant centrifuges they train astronauts with) but hyperbaric pressure in a clinical chamber can't be felt - as you breathe you pressurize all the tissues of your body and rapidly equilibrate internal and external pressure.

At high pressure you have to breathe a special mixture of helium and oxygen so you don't get oxygen toxicity or nitrogen narcosis. If they did pressurize Dallas to that level, he'd need a loooonnnnnng time to decompress. For instance, professional divers working at several hundred feet depth on oil platforms can require several days to safely decompress after a dive of less than an hour. At the rate Dallas was decompressed from astronomically high pressures they would have killed him within minutes.

They don't make hyperbaric chambers that go to "hundreds of atmospheres". The world's record saturation chamber dive, using sophisticated techniques requiring HeliOx, was far less than 100 atmospheres and it took a month to decompress the divers.

Did anyone really buy into the explanation why a VR simulation had to be conducted on the moon?

MRI helmets for VR? Maybe for mapping, but the strong magnetic fields required for MRI would interfere with any electrical devices used to stimulate the cortex.

How about lead shielding for the environmental suits so they could safely pass through the reactor room? In moon gravity, you could wear a lot of lead without any trouble. These guys can buy a spaceship but not lead lined suits?

A computer search for the bank balance 112,462,239 was broken down in a search for substrings "1,12,4,62,23,and 9". What kind of search algorithm is that? Do you search Yahoo for "George" using "G" "eo" and "rge"?

The software "Microsoft 45.1" uses only certain politically correct "personas" like Einstein or John Lennon for the interface, but Hitler and Stalin are unavailable. You mean nobody did any third party "skins" or "mods". If you can make skins for Internet Explorer and mods for Half-Life, I'd guess you could come up with a mod for Stalin if you have the VR technology to do all that other stuff.

Gates' hair turns grey in a matter of minutes due to extreme fear during the simulation. Phil, do your homework - hair is dead tissue. The only way it turns color that fast is if you use Miss Clairol.

Statistics is not spared. We are treated to this little bit of logic: There are probably billions of planets capable of sustaining life, but we only know of one that does. Ergo, the odds of finding life anywhere else is on the order of billions to one. A little problem with statistical sampling there Phil - we've only really checked out one planet so far. And the number of inhabitable planets is just an educated guess. There are only a few documented planets. The rest is conjecture, unless I forgot the names of the other billion known planets.

It's like saying there are 4 billion people on the planet but I only know one person named Herman, so the odds of anyone being named Herman are 4 billion to 1. Using Kerr's statistical logic and the available data, with nine known planets and one with known life, the odds are 9 to 1.

I love this one: Helium is used to cool the reactor because it doesn't boil. Ummmmm, how does liquid helium get to be a gas then, bubba?

I could go on, but I think you get the general picture. It's a skimpy story built on misinformation that goes well beyond the usual suspension of disbelief, and you're actually more ignorant after you've read the book if you're not careful.

I couldn't get past the second chapter. After paragraph long sci-tech footnotes on practically every other page and then an entire section on 'history' of this future world which boiled down to an 'article' on blood, I gave up. Nothing had compelled me or interested me in the least.

If you have an IQ anywhere near 3 digits don't pick this one up. It is without a doubt one of the worst books I have ever started to read. I almost reached for a thesaurus in an attempt to find a word to describe just how bad this is. It's not the premise, which is at least interesting. It's the execution. If you've ever listened to some earnest soul treat you like a cretin and explain in wide eyed wonder something that every schoolboy knows then you'll have some idea as to what you are in for. Here we have an author who feels obliged to describe the bleeding obvious in excruciatingly detailed footnotes. Let me give you a few examples. In the first 12 pages Mr Kerr felt the need to explain that the moon's gravity is 1/6th of Earth, that 'Florence' in a medical setting refers to Florence Nightingale, a description of the purpose of the human immune system and an explanation of a nano-machine.

We are also informed that the escape velocity on the moon is lower than Earth and that Kelvin is the SI unit for temperature ...

If you can plow your way through this to the point where we meet the protagonist you'll find that a simple flat screen is now known by the jaw breaking term 'faux fenetre'

I mean, I can suspend a lot of disbelief in the interests of a good story but I draw the line at stuff like this.

It reads like it was written by a 12yr old who twisted his arm patting himself on the back at how clever he thought he was.

Having been a fan of Kerr's previous novels, I was left disappointed with this one. I didn't care about any of the characters, in fact, I couldn't remember who was whom when I'd leave the book overnight and picked it up again the next day! The lack of emotion of the main character after losing his wife and child were just plain not believable. No grief, nothing, just plain indifference. I found the author's research explaining just about every new technical or futuristic twist too tedious to read...too much blah blah blah after a while. If you're interested in this type of sci-fi, try out James Halperin's "The First Immortal", you'll get far more punch for your money.

I picked up this book after hearing a glowing review on Terry Gross's Fresh Air radio show. Big mistake. The reviewer called the book science fiction for people who don't like science fiction. A more accurate description is this: The Second Angel is science fiction for people who like cardboard characters, hackneyed plots, and wooden dialog covered with a veneer of literary pretension.

I rarely drop a book in the middle, but made an exception for this one. Perhaps the last half is far better than the first. I wouldn't bet on it.

"The thriller of the future"as it is labeled describes the human race in 2069: the majority of the population is infected with P2-virus, making clean blood the most wanted commodity on earth and on the moon. Moon is where the largest blood bank is located and its designer, Dallas, wants to break into it as a revenge after his employer has killed his wife and child.

Philip Kerr has written some wonderful novels (the Berlin Noir trilogy), but this book is definitely a disappointment. The idea in itself is not bad at all, but the action in the book is rather slow (which is killing for a thriller), with lots of technical footnotes describing the situation in the future, some semi-philosophical ranting and the end holds a very unsatisfying twist. A missed chance.

The main character is, in turns, brilliant and idiotic. He designs security systems to protect the world's blood banks and, in the course of work, has to think like a criminal. It's easy to imagine this activity would make a person a bit paranoid. At least aware that not everyone is beneficent. Yet, when it comes to the threat on his own life, he's completely trusting. Add to this the incredible coincidence that this very important person's daughter is struck with an astoundingly rare genetic disorder and you have the making of a forced story. Surround these innocents with two dimensional bad guys, good guys, toss in dense foot notes and tedious exposition, the result is an uncreative stack of paper. Another thing, the editor was sound asleep, redundancy abounds throughout.

Philip Kerr has produced yet another laughably bad work of fiction. This "techno thriller" ranks along side Michael Crichton's work as a poorly constructed hack job. His plot reads like a film outline and the prose reseambles a poorly written screen pay. Kerr's advances and film right deals maybe push his bank balance up but his style, pacing and lousy characterisation are on a serious downward slope, making this his worst book since Esau, (another criminally stupid piece of work that contained some of the worst writing of the decade) The Second Angel is a boring, empty piece of work, Kerr comes across as a pompous know it all , his use of greek mythology , techno babble and copious footnotes becomes very tiresome. (See Also Esau and A Philosophical Investigation) Dana Dallas and his team of "blood robbers" lack any humanity serving the plot only as poorly drawn one dimensional characters. This book is as airless and as bland as the Moon upon which it is set. if you want to read the decent work that Kerr used to produced before his hack days read The Berlin Requiem Series

Having just finished the Berlin Noir trilogy, I couldn't wait to read more Kerr. In Bernie Gunther Kerr created one of the great characters in private eye literature, and took the huge risk of setting his stories during the Third Reich, an experiment that could have failed miserably, but worked flawlessly.

Sadly, that is not true of this work. I even question whether the same author wrote it. In everything that distinguishes Kerr's previous works--characterization, plotting, subtlety, humor--this work falls so far short that it does not seem possible it came from the same mind. I have yet to read the next two Gunther novels, but I am hoping my ill feelings about the author engendered by reading this boring slog won't carry over into that experience. It would be a shame if he has so tarnished himself that he hurts his truly good work.

The only explanation I have for this sorry performance of cartoon characters, thin plot, unbelievable emotional reactions, and tedious intellectual preening is that the author felt confined by the historical constraints of the Berlin series and just wanted to break free. (You can see this same type of thing with Greg Isles, who after the brilliant The Quiet Game and other thrillers wrote his own versions of sci-fi dreck like Sleep No More and Footprints of God, also laced with hi-tech medical mumbo-jumbo) Maybe the lure of selling movie rights is just too great for any author.

I give it two stars because I feel guilty thoroughly trashing such a gifted artist.