可借阅:*
图书馆 | 资料类型 | 排架号 | 子计数 | 书架位置 | 状态 | 图书预约 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
正在检索... Branch | Book | FICTION CLARK, B STR | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... South | Book | F CLARKE | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
链接这些题名
已订购
摘要
摘要
Winner of the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, as well as the first work of fiction ever to win Britain's premier literary environment award-the Natural World Book Prize-The Stream is a finely drawn portrait of a small cross-section of the environment experiencing the conflict between development and conservation. Apart from a few protesters, a plan to bring industry to a scenic but depressed rural area is widely welcomed. It promises new jobs and new hope for those who live there. A few miles away, in a small valley with a stream running through it, responsibility for a farm passes from father to son after years of wrangling between them about the way the land should be managed. Over time, both events impact the stream and, little by little, the small creatures that live in it and the birds and animals that are dependent on it, are sucked into a mute and unseen struggle for survival. Hailed as a second Silent Spring, from an author whose writing Ted Hughes praised as "dazzling," The Stream is a finely wrought novel about human ambition-and life and death in the wild.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
The creatures of a pristine valley stream struggle against the changes wrought by the construction of an industrial park in Clarke's debut novel, which documents the deterioration of a rural ecosystem in poignant detail. After a ponderous opening that describes the forces of nature in wooden prose, Clarke hits his stride as he interweaves the story of the stream's denizens with the story of the machinations behind, and protests against, the park's development. The human characters are forgettable stereotypes, ranging from a corporate activist trying to save the stream to the various executives of Cogent Electronics, the British firm underwriting the industrial project. But the dilemma of the various animals and insects is described in loving, painstaking detail, as Clarke chronicles the demise of the local trout and salmon, then works his way down to the plight faced by mayflies as their environment is overrun with chokeweed and silt. As a work of fiction, Clarke's book is deeply flawed: the animal passages are repetitious, and the human characters severely underdeveloped. But as a naturalistic treatise, this narrative works because it brings home the interdependence of the various animals and their helplessness as their world is altered and they are destroyed. The novelistic blemishes may put off mainstream readers, but the book should find admirers among fans of environmental fiction. Agent, Anderson Grinberg. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
A British fishing and wilderness travel writer turns to fiction to deliver the bad news about what exactly happens when a small, rural stream and its environs undergo industrial development. Clarke's direct prose allows the reader to nest in an environment and witness its demise. The setting is a stream that flows through an old farm, ancient woodland, and an English settlement that can measure its years in millennia. Short chapters chronicle the stream's fate month-by-month, alternating between the natural rhythms of the water and the effects on it of nearby industrial development that taps into the flow, a synchronicity that Clarke plays with to great effect. The area's struggle for economic survival conflicts with the laws of continuity, the natural "law that governed all things," as the author puts it. The stream environment's needs, and those of the cob and the trout, the salmon and the willow and the mink, do not mesh with those of an electronics plant. Clarke's knowledge of waterways--he possesses both the scientist's eye and that of an affectionate familiar--brings readers into intimate association with the food chain supporting the glorious small streams that grace the countryside and give particular character to fast diminishing farmland. Questions of balance, heritage, and priorities are at stake, as well as the peaceable ether of a ramshackle farm. Clarke keeps his language as spare as a prose poem, emphasizing consequences that have a raw and inexorably troubled edge. He judges character by effect, and everyone falls short. As for the trout, the mayfly, the otter . . . wrong place, wrong time. A prizewinning, magnetic first novel of rising, dignified passion, and a perspective-snapping breach to business as usual from an author who knows the beautiful cycle of stream life--and all that will be lost with its demise. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
In concise, vivid chapters that alternate between the perspectives of animals and humans, first-time novelist Clarke dramatizes the life and death of a stream flowing through the English countryside over a five-year period during which environmentalists fail to stop the building of an industrial park and a drought exacerbates the deleterious changes development brings. He offers a fish's-eye view by focusing on a trout's attempt to live the life the law that governed all things decreed that he should live even as the once clean and cool stream turns warm and sluggish, thickened by silt and choke-weed and poisoned with chemical runoff. An astute, knowledgeable naturalist, Clarke also imagines the experiences of a swan, an otter, a heron, and even a mayfly. Equally sensitive to human nature, he portrays a father and son at odds over industrial agricultural methods, environmentalists and businessmen, a politician, and a journalist. The winner of Britain's BP Natural World Book Prize, Clarke's powerfully evocative tale traces the intricate choreography of life and reveals how easily it can be disrupted. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
In his debut novel, Clarke, who writes about fishing for the Times (London), portrays an ecological disaster from the inside. A thriving stream has run through a farm in rural England for a long time, but changes are coming, brought on by a drought, an updating in the farmer's technology, and a nearby industrial and residential development. The main characters are the flora and fauna that abound in and around the stream, a biologically diverse community including trout, salmon, pike, herons, swans, kingfishers, and Baetis mayflies. A large cast of humans appears intermittently in ongoing economic, political, and generational dramas. Over five years, local and national environmental forces fail in their attempts to slow the new development, and lower water, subtle changes in light and temperature, and weeds and silt begin to destroy the ecosystem. The novel was previously published in the United Kingdom, where it won an environmental writing award. Intriguing as a natural history document, it conveys less dramatic impact than might be expected, given the immediacy and reality of this sadly common tale. Recommended for larger collections.-Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.