Meridian 144 - Softcover

Meg Files

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0939149591 ISBN 13: 9780939149599

Publisher: Soho Press, 1991

Synopsis

Kitty Manning is fifty feet underwater off a South Pacific island when nuclear bombs devastate the world. When she emerges from the sea, it is as if for the first time. Everything has changed. No one else can define her life anymore. . . Or save it.

About this title

About the Author

Meg Files is the author of the novels Meridian 144 and The Third Law of Motion, Home Is the Hunter and Other Stories, The Love Hunter and Other Poems, and Writing What You Know, a book about using personal experience and taking risks in writing. She edited Lasting: Poems on Aging. She directs the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and Masters Workshop.

Reviews

YA-- World War III is the backdrop for this tale that combines Robinson Crusoe with a recasting of the Genesis story. Kitty Manning proves to be an Eve of the '90s as she survives nuclear disaster, escaped convicts, religious fanaticism, a typhoon, and, ultimately, her own past. Through a developing sense of self-redemption, her new clear-headedness enables her to defeat evil, rescue a possible Adam, and take the first hesitant steps that might create a second Eden on a South Pacific island. Through the liberal use of flashbacks, Files reconstructs her heroine's past life. While not dwelling on the causes of the war, she gives a nod to the realities of post-Soviet international politics by having the destruction stem from nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable Middle Eastern nations. The author spares readers technodrama and political polemics, however, in favor of one woman's life and struggle to endure. Unlike previous entries in the end-of-life-as-we-know-it genre, this story ends with a glimmer of realistic hope. Grisly and poetic in turn, it should appeal to mature, thoughtful, and sensitive YAs.
- Carolyn E. Gecan, Thomas Jefferson Sci - Tech, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Files's riveting debut novel begins with a bang, literally and figuratively. Kit Manning, an American woman teaching on a South Pacific island, is underwater, deep-sea diving, when "everything suddenly flares bright yellow." It's a nuclear holocaust, and when Kit, protected by her oxygen tanks, resurfaces, she finds her world decimated. Carefully underplaying the story of the disaster, Files gives it psychological truth by introducing scenes from Kit's past, showing her adolescent struggles with an unfulfilled mother as well as her devastated marriage, and we see that even without the nuclear apocalypse, Kit has felt her life to be in ruins. The authenticity of the character development offsets the contrivances in the plot. (Kit's trusty dog, for example, has been protected from the bombs, and Kit eventually finds other survivors, some menacing, some friendly, each handily endowed with particular expertise.) Superb pacing maximizes the suspense, propelling the reader to discover exactly how Kit will resolve her memories and face an extraordinary future.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the tradition of visionary, end-of-the-world novels, Files's debut rates low, as a woman survives a nuclear holocaust only to spend the rest of her time on earth contemplating her botched-up love life. The time is now, the place is a Pacific island something like Guam that's divided up arbitrarily among the natives, Japanese tourists, and the US military. Catherine Manning, a schoolteacher recently escaped from a joyless marriage and neurotic urban lifestyle on the US mainland, is scuba-diving off the coast with her current beau, an Air Force captain, when there's a sudden flash of light, an earthquake-like shudder, and an eruption of underwater debris. The captain is killed, and when a panicky Catherine, gulping mouthfuls of bottled oxygen, emerges from the watery depths, it is to find a world decimated by nuclear war. While repairing to the local dive shop to stockpile more bottles of uncontaminated air, releasing her dog from the island's quarantine pen (where it has miraculously survived), and scouring the island for packaged food, decent shelter and other survivors, Catherine begins to turn her thoughts inexplicably to the cindered remains of her own love life. Descriptions of her anxiety-ridden childhood, her unhappy marriage, and a series of sordid extramarital affairs are not only interspersed quite awkwardly with vivid evocations of a post-holocaust world and of violent confrontations with other survivors, but they're given equal weight--a decision that would be funny if it weren't so depressing. In the end, Catherine manages to join a group of ``good'' survivors to try to carry on the human race--though the reader, chilled to the bone by Catherine's phenomenal narcissism, may wonder why they bother. An oddity--cheerless and somber, with all the trappings and none of the import of literary profundity. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Triggered in the Middle East, nuclear devices virtually destroy the entire world, but a few people survive. One is Catherine Manning, who was scuba diving with her latest lover off a Micronesian island. A teacher, Catherine has left behind in the States a failed marriage and several meaningless affairs. Her struggle to survive the nuclear disaster is interspersed with flashbacks covering her childhood, education, marriage, and affairs. She meets other survivors of the blast--some good, some evil. The climax proves Catherine's determination to survive and battle evil. This first novel is well written, exciting, and filled with some probing thoughts about the insanity of nuclear weapons, the human condition, and death. Not to worry, there is humor, too.
- Robert H. Donahugh, formerly with Youngstown & Mahoning Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0939149591
• ISBN 13: 9780939149599
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264