From: brock@ucsub.Colorado.EDU (Steve Brock)
Subject: Review of Green River Rising (fiction)
Date: 21 Dec 1994 04:11:39 GMT

GREEN RIVER RISING by Tim Willocks.  William Morrow and Company,
1350 Avenue of the Americas, N.Y., NY 10019, (800) 843-9389, (201)
227-6849 FAX.  360 pp., $23.00 cloth.  0-688-13571-4

                     Reviewed by Steve Brock

     Horrific, raw, lurid, and guaranteed to make even the most
stoic reader uncomfortable, Willocks's first novel, set in a
prison, opens with a speech by Warden John Hobbes.  As he speaks,
an inmate throws a turd at him.  Hobbes picks it up and squeezes it
in his fist, sneering.  He announces a total lockdown and tells the
guards to turn off the air conditioning in the East Texas
penitentiary.  A guard, under his breath, mutters, "There'll be
blood..."  And the blood is the tame part.
     Complicating the social hierarchy of the prison, Hobbes (a
believer in the panoptic designs of Jeremy Bentham) has also set
the stage for disaster when he transfers a black transvestite from
the cell with "her" white boyfriend back into the block where black
inmates are housed.  
     The boyfriend, Nev Agry, has plans to get his "Claudine" back,
and the plans will play hell with the novel's hero, orthopedic
surgeon Ray Klein, who has just been told that he has won parole
and will be freed the next day.  Klein, convicted of a rape he did
not commit, has spent his years behind bars practicing karate,
assisting in the prison infirmary, and, on the side, earning the
grudging respect of the cons by attending to their assorted medical
needs.
     Once a week, Klein helps psychologist Juliette Devlin in her
studies of AIDS patients.  There is a physical spark between the
two, but neither has mentioned it.  When the inevitable riot
begins, Devlin is trapped in the infirmary, and Klein must try to
rescue her by walking through the putrid, chest-high "Green River"
- a sewer that flows under the prison.  Then he must single-
handedly squelch the battle.
     This is a lot for Willocks to ask of the reader, and for the
most part, he pulls it off.  There are a few places where he
blunders, especially in asking readers to believe that Devlin will
consentingly have sex with Klein (after already having sex with
another inmate) while the riot rages above and inmates threaten to
smash down the door of the love nest at any moment.
     Willocks, himself a British psychiatrist and surgeon, is at
his best when he describes the ferocity of emotions that have been
kept clamped in the penitentiary's pressure-cooker.  He's also
adept at personifying the criminally insane as being able to
perform acts of altruism along with the grotesque.
     The novel is infused with such a vicious relentlessness that
it should have a warning label: "read only on an empty stomach." 
Grade: B
     The film rights to "Green River Rising" have been sold to Alan
J. Pakula, and Willocks is at work on the screenplay.  With all of
the rumors connecting Willocks and Madonna, guess who might play
Devlin?  The novel's plot will also make a great arcade game.