Kalimantan - Hardcover

Uncharacteristically rambling, confused stab at the heart-of- darkness theme, from the acclaimed author of Life During Wartime (1987) and several story collections. British expatriate Barnett befriends a young American wastrel, MacKinnon, who disappears into the interior of Borneo and later is reported to be experimenting with dangerous native psychoactive drugs. The Dutch doctor, old Tenzer, sends a request for Barnett's help. When Barnett arrives on the scene after an eerie, portentous journey, both Tenzer and the waidan, the ghost of a female shaman apparently murdered by MacKinnon, urge Barnett to take MacKinnon's drug, enter the spirit world, and kill MacKinnon to halt his awesome and still-growing power. No real harm will be done, the waidan assures Barnett, since the drug confers spirit immortality. Barnett takes the drug and emerges not in the spirit world but into another reality containing, for some reason, a huge crashed alien spaceship and an incomprehensible alien city, both long abandoned. Barnett eventually kills MacKinnon, only to learn that he's been double-crossed by both Tenzer and the waidan. What with all the tedious, meandering philosophical padding: a confusing and uneasy hybrid of fantasy and sf, with the ideas not even half-thought-out. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Barnett, a dealer in jewels, sits down at a table in his store in Banjormasim, Borneo, and invites the reader to hear a first-person adventure set in his country's mysterious interior. An untrustworthy white man named Mackinnon comes across a witch doctor's drug that gives access to a parallel world--at the cost of native lives. One of the victims is a local witch whose spirit moves to the other world and sets in motion the events that will restore a balance. Its echoes of Conrad notwithstanding, Shepard's ( Green Eyes ) story resembles more than anything else the recitation of a dream in which logic is completely discarded and the motivation of the characters remains undeveloped. Atmospheric in setting, intriguing in its premise and somewhat suspenseful, Shepard's tale falls off at the end and fails its characters, none of whom--not even those who die--change or grow during the course of the story.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.