Fragment by Warren Fahy – Book Review

Debut Novelist Aims to Be Best-seller with Jurassic-style Adventure

May 5, 2009

With global crises all around, it's reassuring to imagine fictional characters battling a vengeful eco-system gone mad - and surviving. Phew, it's just pretend!

Fragment – breathlessly trailed by publisher Harper as this year’s ‘worldwide bestseller’ – is a fast-paced adventure in which humans are shredded in a ‘hurricane of death’ on a long-lost island where evolution has taken a freakish turn.

It’s the latest in a superabundant genre in which bio-disasters (Survivors, The Day of the Triffids), the climate (The Day after Tomorrow, The Perfect Storm) and wildlife (Jaws, The Swarm), among others, have all had a go at the human race.

King Kong and Jurassic Park

Warren Fahy’s thriller relies heavily on DNA from King Kong and Jurassic Park, mixed with contemporary references for the Lost generation.

The cast and crew of a reality TV show, SeaLife, which is beamed from a trimaran called the Trident, receive a distress single from remote, unexplored Henders Island.

Hybrid Monsters and Vicious Insects

Here they stroll into a hostile environment that has somehow evolved in total isolation for millions of years. The result is a human death-trap with monstrous hybrid creatures, vicious insects and predatory plants.

Scientists are dismayed by this alternate eco-system, realising that if one bug reaches the known world it would obliterate all rivals.

Spigers and Disk-Ants

Horrors such as enormous Spigers – six-legged jumping spiders crossed with tigers – and fiendishly deadly Disk-Ants, resembling intelligent Ninja throwing stars, are no match for any species back home.

Henders is an ecological armageddon-in-waiting and POTUS, as the President of the United States is referred to by characters here, swiftly concludes he better nuke the place. The story then becomes a race against time for scientists trapped on the island.

Fragment The Movie?

Somewhere, someone must be doing a deal to bring this to the big screen, and CGI artists will be licking their lips at the prospect. Visit Warren Fahy’s website and detailed artwork already reveals what his creatures and island look like. How about that for pre-production planning?

Fragment is a pop-thriller with a lot of marketing-savvy behind it. The best part of the novel is the vision it conjures of a hyper-accelerated lifecycle of ferocious hunting, killing and rebirth. This imagined world is as disconcerting and unforgettable as the dreamscapes of a JG Ballard story.

Characters

Typical of this breed of escapist reading, however, it hardly allows its characters to evolve emotionally, not so much sketching them in for readers as lightly outlining them with tracing paper.

When introducing SeaLife’s boffins and producers, Fahy tells his readers which brand and style of trainer each is wearing (Jesse, silver Nikes; Nell, beat-up Adidas; Zero, New Balance RXTerrain etc). While this might chime with young readers, it’s a slim insight into our protagonists’ inner lives.

The dialogue also throws readers off the scent at times. Nell Duckworth, one of Fragment’s lead characters, is asked by a guy called Zero why she became a botanist, and she says, ‘Well, when my mom was killed by a jellyfish in Indonesia, I decided to study plants.’

Page-turner

Such moments may not jar with readers of a yarn designed to be a page-turner, but the last quarter of the story might. Without wanting to expose too much of the plot, this occurs when a new life form is discovered.

What at first seems a striking twist soon adds a cute, cuddly touch that drastically deflates our suspended disbelief and the story loses its edge here.

Warren Fahy

Fahy lives in San Diego, California, has been a bookseller, statistical analyst, managed a movie database and produced creative content for robotic toys. Fragment will no doubt carve him a new career to follow these.

He’s spent three years studying the science that informs this debut. Following Michael Crichton’s lead, he uses a lot of data in the novel (too much at times) to give it a veneer of reality.

With maps and sketches of Henders wildlife included, Fragment should entertain quite a few holidaymakers trying to forget swine-flu and global warming on the beach this summer – unless, perhaps, they’re staying on a remote island.

The copyright of the article Fragment by Warren Fahy – Book Review in Thriller Fiction is owned by Robin Jarossi. Permission to republish Fragment by Warren Fahy – Book Review in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.