War Zone, The - Softcover

Stuart, Alexander

3.49

288 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553348787 ISBN 13: 9780553348781

Publisher: Bantam, 1990

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Tom gets caught up in a destructive relationship with his older sister, Jessie, who enjoys manipulating other people's lives

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About the Author:

Alexander Stuart (aka Alexander Chow-Stuart) is a Los Angeles-based, British-born novelist and screenwriter, whose novels, non-fiction and children's books have been translated into eight languages and published in the US, Britain, Europe and throughout the world. His most controversial novel, The War Zone, about a family torn apart by incest, was turned into a searingly emotional film by Oscar-nominated actor/director Tim Roth. At the time of the book's initial publication, it was stripped of the Whitbread Best Novel Award amid controversy among the panel of three judges. As a screenwriter, Stuart has worked with actors ranging from Angelina Jolie to Jodie Foster, and with directors including Tim Roth, Danny Boyle and Jonathan Glazer. Stuart lives in California with his wife, Charong Chow, their two young children and a growing menagerie of pets. www.alexanderstuart.com

From Publishers Weekly:

A photo of children in bomb-torn Beirut hangs in the bedroom of Tom, the adolescent narrator of this taut, gripping novel by a young British writer. The war zone of the title, however, is the seemingly tranquil village in Devon where Tom and his family have moved from London. Bored and restless, Tom at first seems a contemporary Holden Caulfield, possessed of an urge to do mischief to establish his identity. But as he relates the circumstances that transform his lifehis discovery of the incestuous relationship between his father and his older sister Jessiethe novel reveals its sinister, shocking theme. Because he and Jessie have always been close, the situation feels like a double betrayal to Tom, who also realizes that to reveal the bizarre secret to his mother, preoccupied with a new baby, will destroy them all. In electrically tense prose, Stuart succeeds in enveloping the reader in the surcharged atmosphere of sexual perversion. Although Tom's painful emotional limbo is effectively conveyed, however, Stuart's portrayal of Jessie is less successful. The young woman's cool, nervy manipulation of her father and Tom, her determination to engage in every form of sexual experience, is meant to mirror the "corrupt, repressive" society of Thatcher's England, but Jessie loses her credibility as she leads Tom into a maelstrom of depravity and violence. The denouement, containing the rationale for Jessie's behavior, is unconvincing, but until that point the reader is caught up in a riveting tale.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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