Much to see, hear, and reminisce about in tales of a compelling historic accuracy—though the pleasures, in end, aren’t deep.
Barlow debuts with three novellas: capable, researched, of varying interest.
The title story is doubtless the most engaging, and most awful. After WWII, with food in England still scarce, a waiter in a hotel restaurant is asked by one of the guests to concoct, however he can, an olive-oil-based fruit drink—no less than eight pints of it—and bring it to the guest’s room by that evening. The waiter does so—though he’ll lose his job for having commandeered the scarce ingredients—and, on delivery to the room, asks the gentleman what he needs the concoction for. The guest turns out to be none other than Michael “Cast Iron” Mulligan, professional eater, who began his career by eating great quantities of things but now eats strange kinds of things—and is this night going off to eat a chair. The waiter, fired as soon as he returns to the kitchen, becomes apprentice to Mulligan, learns how to use the big grinding machine that reduces almost anything to theoretical edibility—and carries on the tradition after Mulligan’s sadly forced retirement. Readers will find for themselves what constitutes the epigone’s most extraordinary and repulsive “meal.” In the second story, a mutated kitten born in a Victorian workhouse (the little creature has wings) becomes a kind of catalyst for all sorts of stories, terrifying some people into madness, enchanting others, proving profitable to still more—until tale’s strands are all knit together in a rather Dickensian manner. Barlow’s last novella is another piece of impeccably researched Victoriana, but it also drones on—and on—as a kind of loose-knit and puffed-up tall tale as English villagers go more than all out in creating a great local festival—all to keep the workers’ favorite makers of the new-fangled but much-loved pork pie from leaving town.
Much to see, hear, and reminisce about in tales of a compelling historic accuracy—though the pleasures, in end, aren’t deep.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059175-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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