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POBBY AND DINGAN

Name: POBBY AND DINGAN
Author: Ben Rice
ISBN: 0-375-41127-5

by Ben Rice ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2000

Some will grumble, feeling manipulated, while many, many more will shed a quiet tear or two.

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Out of Australia’s rough-and-tumble opal country, London-dwelling Rice’s debut extracts a sweet little nougat—or, it might be said, a chunk of shameless melodrama.

Ashmol Williamson’s opal-mining father drinks too much; his pretty mother yearns for the beauties of England (and the upper-class marriage prospect) that she left behind in following her husband to Australia (with his distant dream of wealth); and Ashmol’s sister Kellyanne has—well, she has two silent and invisible friends, a girl named Dingan and a boy named Pobby. The toughly boyish Ashmol ridicules Kellyanne’s friends, but his quick-witted sister is ever ready at their defense—when Ashmol punches the empty air where Dingan is supposed to “be” and asks why he gets no punches back, Kellyanne retorts, “Cos Dingan is a pacifist, stupid.” The same is true with the children’s father, whose skepticism borders on the cruel—until, that is, his wife castigates him fiercely (“You haven’t found any opal in two years. Not a glimpse of it. And opal’s real enough for you”), humiliating him so badly that he makes amends in any way he can, even including the offer to take Pobby and Dingan with him for a working day at his claim. Which he does, the only trouble being that he forgets them there. Kellyanne’s distraction at the loss of her friends sends her into a serious decline—physical? psychological?—and Ashmol into action (“And then I figured out something else. I didn’t like to admit it, but it seemed to me the only way to make Kellyanne better would be to find Pobby and Dingan”). Ashmol’s activities and the tale’s unwindings from there on are comprised of approximately equal parts of, let us say, Dickens, Twain—and Disney.

Some will grumble, feeling manipulated, while many, many more will shed a quiet tear or two.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-41127-5

Page Count: 80

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.