The four children who make up ["the unit" in Dustland], Thomas, Levi, Justice and Dorian, and who in their encounter with "the future" sometimes lose "psychic chunks", are so scantily drawn as to evade the imagination. However assiduously we follow up clues and try to interpret allegories (even with recourse to The New Testament, Tolkien, or Psychic News), without a picture of the children, only available in Dustland's precursor, Justice and her Brothers or towards the end of Dustland itself, we risk bewilderment and boredom. This is a great pity for if the two books had been combined the Dustland episode would have been absorbed into an intriguing whole.
In the earlier book we gradually become aware of the extrasensory powers of a family of three American, small-town, lower middle class children and their friend Dorian. The unlikelihood of ESP, which is skilfully inserted into the main narrative, is acceptable to the sceptic and enhances rather than detracts from a delicate and adventurous story of sibling rivalry. It is easy to believe in the telepathic "identicals" (twins, Thomas and Levi), and Dorian who has healing powers and whose slovenly down-South mother, "the Sensitive", shows the heroine, "singleton" Justice how to come to terms with her extra dimension of perception. Parental attempts to understand their children's abnormal powers and adolescent quarrels, with the aid of common sense, folk adage and adult-education-class science, help keep the story on a knife edge of reality; at the same time we are prepared for the improbable.
This is a free excerpt of 250 words. There are 476 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Hamilton, Virginia (Edith) 1936–: Critical Essay by Holly Eley Access Pass.
