The Curiosity: A Novel

Image of The Curiosity: A Novel
Author(s): 
Release Date: 
July 9, 2013
Publisher/Imprint: 
William Morrow
Pages: 
448
Reviewed by: 

What would your reaction be if you had fallen overboard into the Arctic Ocean in 1906 and reanimated in a lab in present-day Boston?

Over a hundred years frozen in an iceberg hardly prepares Judge Jeremiah Rice for awakening into a world of scantily clad young girls with facial piercings and tattoos, nor young men in ill-fitting trousers. Computers, iPods, humans landing on the moon, two world wars, the changed status of women and minorities, jet planes, mass media—all are all facets of a world so very different from his own.

To egocentric but brilliant Erastus Carthage, director of the Lazarus Project, Jeremiah is a specimen. In fact, Carthage never refers to Jeremiah by name, only as Subject One.

To Dr. Kate Philo, who led the scientific team that recovered his body, Jeremiah is a man, a human being trying to cope. “As I led him into the chamber, the man from the past held me close against his side, like I was the only thing to keep him from falling off the face of the earth.”

To Daniel Dixon, journalistic hack employed by a small, quasi-scientific magazine, Jeremiah is his ticket to the penthouse, an object to be exploited for gain. “I'd been interviewing bigwigs for my book” pray tell, sir and ma'am, what the Lazarus Project means to our disintegrating society and all that hot air.”

To religious fundamentalist protestors, Jeremiah is a violation of divine law, raised from the dead not by God, but by godless scientists.

Judge Jeremiah Rice is a man who desperately wishes that his second chance at life serve a higher purpose than merely existing as a curiosity.

Combination thriller and philosophical novel, The Curiosity fulfills both criteria well. The story as a medical and scientific thriller about a man endangered by the expectations and selfish exploitation of those around him provides the reader with both suspense and dread as we cheer for the protagonist to escape his minders and find an anonymous life with Kate.

As a philosophical novel The Curiosity raises questions about human mortality as we have always understood it, and also reveals the often ugly aspects of human character: our greed, our selfishness, our violence, and our boundless envy of those we perceive to have more, or be better than, ourselves.

Mr. Kiernan's debut novel also does one thing more: It offers a balance, precarious though it may be, of how powerful and unselfish love can offset our more undesirable traits. In the character of Kate Philo, Mr. Kiernan has created a woman whose strengths equal her vulnerabilities.

Although one wishes the writing were less self-conscious and more taut, Mr. Kiernan's first novel is very compelling and certainly leaves the readers with questions to consider.