Word: subterranean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hill's novel also features subterranean action, in coal shafts both employed and abandoned. He blends earnest depiction of working-class culture, subtle glimpses of the corrosive effect of crime on victims and perpetrators, a doomed romance between a miner and a police official's college teacher wife, a series of comic set pieces starring the official's bullying superior, and a whole slew of secrets unwisely unearthed. The daring mingling of genres works rather better than the cluttered plot. Most memorable are the scenes of the central character, a wilder version of the bright boy who is the schoolteacher...
...Brotherhood is Iris Murdoch's 23rd novel. That number alone does not fully convey the amazing range of her productivity. For as seasoned Murdoch readers can attest, she has seldom been content simply to tell one story at a time. Her fiction typically doubles up, offering both explicit and subterranean tales. On the surface, civilized, well-educated characters move about in theoretical freedom, working out their destinies according to the dictates of reason and plausibility. But actually they are in thrall to hidden forces, submerged patterns, in danger of being swallowed up, say, by the plot of a gothic novel...
...movie version of Phantom, although few have read Gaston Leroux's turgid 1910 thriller about the hideously misshapen genius who constitutes himself the shadow ruler of the Paris Opera House and, upon becoming infatuated with a chorine, maneuvers her career from afar. The beauty-and-the- beast theme and subterranean wonderland setting echo the myths of Persephone, Pygmalion and Faust and also contemporarily embrace Freudian metaphors of sexual awakening. The Broadway launch has been boosted by publicity about Phantom in London, where, since its debut in October 1986, virtually the only way to get in on short notice has been...
...Phantom, described as a scholar, seems more a necromancer, dematerializing, teleporting, even dodging bullets. He defies the laws of gravity and physics: his kingdom in the bowels of the Paris Opera House is reached by rowing across a subterranean lake through which candelabra rise and descend, mysteriously unquenched. The lagoon seems to be at or above the level of his hideaway, yet his chambers remain unflooded. Allow oneself a moment's skepticism and the story turns to piffle. But audiences give themselves over to the fantasy concocted by Prince and Designer Maria Bjornson, letting logic evanesce as long...
...hour northwest of Saigon, government tour guides fire their only major barrage of propaganda. In a lecture complete with pointer and diagrams, Nguyen Viet Hai, 33, details how ingenious Viet Cong escaped detection by U.S. soldiers by hiding out in a network of narrow, subterranean tunnels. Next, visitors are invited to go below ground and taste the claustrophobic flavor of tunnel life for themselves. The guides hasten to point out that the passageways have been enlarged to accommodate Caucasian visitors. Before the group descends, Hai recites the tunnel dwellers' motto: "When you walk without footmarks, when you talk without...