Brown is able to make his narrative both sizzling and swashbuckling.
A novel of pirates in 1819.
Owen Wedgwood has a good job as a chef for Lord Ramsey when the latter’s house is broken into by Hannah Mabbot, captain of the Flying Rose. For obscure reasons—obscure at least to Wedgewood, who narrates the story—she murders Ramsey in cold blood and has her pirate minion Mr. Apples kidnap Wedgewood, for she’s thrilled to discover he’s a cook; it’s been difficult to have fine dining aboard a pirate ship. While distressed to have been captured, Wedgwood is even more upset to discover he’s expected every Sunday to create culinary masterpieces from the thin gruel (as it were) of the ship’s store, but somehow he manages. For example, he’s able to create yeast bread by holding the rising dough against the warmth of his belly. At first, he ekes out acceptable meals, but as he’s able to raid the ship’s larder and occasionally get provisions in untoward ways, his Sunday meals become ever more creative and spectacular. Eventually, he turns out delicacies such as “Herring pâté with rosemary on walnut bread. Tea-smoked eel ravioli seared with caramelized garlic and bay leaf...and rum-poached figs stuffed with Pilfered Blue cheese and drizzled with honey.” But Captain Mabbot is not interested solely in fine cuisine: She’s on a quest to track down the Brass Fox, another villainous pirate who turns out to be her son—and whose father is none other than Lord Ramsey. It seems that Ramsey’s business concern, the Pendleton Trading Company, is deeply involved in the opium trade, hauling the illicit drug from India to China, and Captain Mabbot wants to put a stop to it.
Brown is able to make his narrative both sizzling and swashbuckling.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-12366-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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