Canal Dreams

Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on her cello…CANAL DREAMS is a novel of deceptive simplicity and dark, original power: stark psychological insights mesh with vividly realised scenarios in an ominous projection of global realpolitik. The result is yet another major landmark in the quite remarkable career of an outstanding modern novelist.
From Publishers WeeklyBecause she is afraid to fly during a time of international tensions, famous Japanese cellist Hisako Onoda boards a tanker en route to her concert in Rotterdam. When a conflict erupts and the Panama Canal is closed, the ship is forced to drop anchor in Gatun Lake. A guerrilla faction takes the passengers and crew captive, Hisako is raped, and we watch as the sensitive musician metamorphoses into a grenade-toting avenging warrior. This stunning, hallucinatory, semi-surreal fable pits an artistic, precariously balanced sensibility against a world of brutal political forces. Among the ship's passengers, all taken hostage by the People's Liberation Front, are a South African engineer, an erudite Egyptian and Hisako's wimpy young French boyfriend. Banks ( The Wasp Factory ) doesn't do much with these characters. His wrenching story, which can be read as a parable of the feminine principle reasserting itself and taking revenge on earth-destroying males, derives its power from the exploration of Hisako's mental states, her violent nightmares and her flashbacks to Japan, where she became a prodigy, strove to please her mother and missed a father she never knew, dead from radiation sickness in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library JournalStranded in Panama during an international crisis, cellist Hisako Onodo witnesses the death of her French lover at the hands of terrorists and brings her hitherto untested powers of will and desperation to bear in a one-woman vendetta. Set in the near future, the latest novel by the author of The Bridge ( LJ 4/15/89) grows in intensity as its heroine divests herself of everything except for her desire for revenge. Not quite sf but more than realism, this tale of obsession should be considered by libraries that can afford to go beyond their priority lists.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.