"Esteemed Gentlemen: Flee Washington. It is a forked-tongue city.

It had tried to take his daughter. It had put its mark on her. But she would not be marked forever."

With a fortune that he has made in mercury, Owen Scraperton founds Pristina, a utopian village in Mexico. But of the conflict, dissent, and madness that quickly emerges within the village...who's to say whether it's the effect of the mercury or of the oppressive utopian ideology itself?

As Owen struggles to maintain his power, his own daughter Victoria becomes her father's greatest critic. A utopia is inherently unstable, and those in power necessarily can't remain there, for love of their own position. Contrary to Owen's hope for Victoria, that she'll remain unmarked -- as 'pristine' as his vision of Pristina -- Victoria embraces her role as a political figure, driving dissent toward her father based on his own founding principles.

Unfortunately, the premise is better than the novel's style. Much of the narrative feels almost picaresque, as characters dodge in and out of the storyline without rhyme or reason. The voice and style is poised in a no-man's-land in which readers are held at arm's length from any character's sentiments or motivation, making it a slow read. ( )

I received a copy of this book from the Library Thing Early Reviewer's group. Despite my best efforts, I was never able to get into the right "groove" for this story. I was always wondering "Is this set in real, actual history? Or imagined history? Are these characters acting like they would if they lived in this time period, or differently due to their positions in the utopian town?"

The book is not bad; to the contrary, I read more of it than I meant to since the writing itself is excellent. In the end, though, I set it aside. Maybe I'll come back to it in the future when we're in the same groove :)

Excellent writing, and a beautiful book on its own, makes me give this a 3 out of 5 stars. ( )

This was not the book I expected when I read the blurb on the early reviewers page. I am a huge dystopian/utopian society fan, but I think most of those sorts of books I read are in the young adult genre and therefore I wasn’t prepared for such a heavy book. This is not an easy quick read; in fact, I will be reading it again to get the full idea of all that happened. By the time I got to the end I finally had in my mind who everyone was and how the town fit together and I just felt like I had missed so much while reading the rest of the book and trying to place where all the characters were. I did really enjoy this book, it is wonderfully written and the characters are quite interesting and unique. As long as you don’t go into this thinking it’s going to be a light, easy read (like I did) you will enjoy this book. I can see it being a great book to discuss in a book club or similar situation. And it really is just a great piece of literature, I highly recommend it!

For a more in depth and personal review see my blog:
http://explanniefyfed.blogspot.com/2012/09/book-review-mercury-fountain-by-eliza... ( )

Texas has long has the reputation of being its own place, not entirely subject to the rules that govern other states. Consider that many of its inhabitants still consider it the Republic of Texas and that it was once its own sovereign state. This mindset coupled with its mountainous and desert landscape make it the perfect place to set Eliza Factor's debut novel about a turn of the 20th century utopia centered around mercury mining.

As the novel opens, charismatic mine owner Owen Scraperton is summoned from the bowels of the mercury mine to attend his wife as she gives birth to their first child. Scraperton chooses not to wash off the mine residue as he prepares to greet his son (who turns out to be a daughter) because the mine and the utopia he's founded around it, Pristina, define who he is as a man. Over the next two decades of the story, the Principles on which Pristina was founded change and warp as Owen continues to make his utopia an organic thing to suit his own needs. All the while he continues extolling the value of the mercury that flows beneath the surface and that provides a dangerous and unhealthy livelihood to so many of the impoverished in the town and the surrounding mountains.

In addition to Owen, the novel is peopled by strange and broken people. There is Owen's wife Dolores, a much younger Mexican woman who might never have loved her husband and who only finds freedom galloping on horseback, pounding through the barren land around the town. Scraperton daughter Victoria, whose birth opens the novel, is fork-tongued and enamoured of snakes. Her ultimate belief in the original Principles will come into direct conflict with her father's compromised dream and bring about its downfall. Dr. Badinoe, the alcoholic doctor whose scientific knowledge of the poisonous effects of mercury causes him to question his own moral center in remaining in this town, appears through the novel as an imperfect moral compass. And then there's Ysidro, an insignificant peon who becomes a folk hero and a rallying point for the mountain and cave dwelling miners and their families outside the town who, with Victoria, will inadvertantly bring tensions in this dystopia to a head.

This allegorical novel about the dangers of strict, blind adherence to ideology is well written but not terribly engaging. The characters were almost entirely one dimensional and dry. The lead-up to the showdown between Owen and Victoria is long and slow and the pacing is glacial. The family interactions were meant to humanize the characters but dragged instead. The cardinal sin here for me was that ultimately I was bored by the story. Others around the internet disagree so readers interested in western-set utopian novels or in novels dealing with general ideologies should give this their own try. ( )

Owen Scraperton, the landowner patriarch near the center of Eliza Factor's novel The Mercury Fountain, had a dream. He dreamt of a utopia of his own construction - a land where men worked the ground for its mercury, and where families lived principled lives. He called his utopia Pristina.

He outlawed alcohol, cards, and Catholicism. He built his little empire in the Texan desert at the turn of the twentieth century, and he started a family with his headstrong Mexican wife Dolores. When Factor's novel begins, Owen's life has been (apparently) perfect. By the time the novel ends, the toxicity of Owen's ideology (built upon principles that ignore both science and human nature) has doomed him and his utopia to failure.

But any allegory, such as this is, would be pale without a little personification. Chalk the downfall of Owen's system up to his deluded sense of right and wrong, and all you've got is a morality play. But pour the poison of Owen's unyielding ideals into the form of his forked-tongued daughter Victoria, and you've got the stuff that myths are made of. Factor has written Victoria as a goddess.

Dr. Badinoe observes regarding his friend Owen's mercury mine: "Poison is in everything and no thing is without poison, the dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy."That is to say, of course, moderation in all things. Victoria is not inherently evil, but her disposition coupled with her mutilation (a split tongue, the result of an injury sustained on a family trip to Washington D. C.) and her singular love of snakes make her appear so. It is her father's lessons that actually make her a kind of evil but, as with the mine, evil shall always return to the source. It is Owen's self-righteous and poorly-founded ideals that eventually poison Victoria against him, just as it is Owen's unwillingness to see the scientific truths about his mercury mine that leads to his physical demise.

Although Factor's writing has a modern feel to it, she does not appear to be targeting any current political issue or policy explicitly; rather she seems to be advocating a fluid sort of social consciousness, noting that any ideology that cannot bend and stretch can not guide nor govern either. In a world where hatred based on race, creed, gender, class and sexual orientation seems to be endemic, it's a lesson that most people could stand to learn.

Lauren Cartelli
www.theliterarygothamite.com ( )