A middle-aged psychiatrist, comfortably settled into her modern-world lifestyle, receives a cryptic package from an old friend that leads her on a journey into the horrors of Southeast Asia. By the author of The Ice Age. 15,000 first printing. This is the end of a trilogy, begun by The Radiant Way ( LJ 10/15/87) and A Natural Curiosity ( LJ 7/89), that examines life through the eyes of Liz, Esther, and Alix, three friends who met at Cambridge in the 1950s. In this final novel, Liz appears as a counterpoint to Stephen Cox. Influenced by Conrad and his own work as a novelist, Stephen succumbs to an overwhelming desire to observe first-hand the antithetical world of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. His friends are skeptical, but no one becomes morbidly concerned until the relics of his journey arrive in a package for Liz. A fascinating mystery ensues, one that's sturdy enough to carry the full weight of sobering social commentary and political reportage along with it. Drabble structures the novel around divided narratives, rather than straight chronology, reasserting in the process her abiding interest in the complexities of human experience. A bibliography is included. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92. - Janet W. Reit, Univ. of Vermont Lib., Burlington Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. So comfortable has Drabble become with the baggy formula for her our-gang novels (The Radiant Way, Natural Curiosity) that here she even appends a bibliography, a list of actual books that her character, as well as their creator, might have read to negotiate the present work's concerns. Liz Headland, the London psychiatrist of the earlier two novels, has received in the mail a package from the Far East. It's from Stephen Cox, the novelist--and apart from jottings and stray drafts, it contains a human finger bone. Cox, intrigued by the fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge, has made his way to Thailand, then Vietnam, and hopes to go further into Pol Pot's former heart of darkness. Back in London, Liz sifts through the fragments hoping to find a weave--and when she doesn't, she feels she must herself find Cox, from whom no one's heard anything for a long time. Her search dovetails through near-disaster (toxic-shock syndrome in a Bangkok hotel) with what she discovers has been Stephen's demise by illness deep in the Cambodian jungle. Drabble, ever the schematicist, jumps blithely from Liz's London overcivilization to Stephen's dread-filled voyage into primitive evil, scattering contrasts as she goes. Paradoxically, what saves the book from the triviality of its predecessors is this moving-finger-of-fate approach. Here, it mostly works. Attitudes are overarched by pity and terror; individual lives seem movingly fragile against the forces of chaos. Still, Drabble's global, sampling manner is frustrating. In sections about the Far East here, she writes as a novelist-- particular, definitive, surprising. Most everywhere else, she is at the lower flame of the journalist/littrateur, telling us what we know already. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Used Book in Good Condition