Not Kennedy’s shapeliest or subtlest book, but probably her best yet.
The life of the writer is subjected to intensive and scathing analysis in this highly interesting (if more than a little overextended) third novel by the young Scots author of Original Bliss (1999), etc.
Kennedy’s two protagonists are Nathan Staples, an irascible writer who lives among a small colony of peers on remote Foal Island off the coast of Wales (and supports himself by cranking out Gothic “splatter” fiction)—and Mary Lamb, a hopeful young writer who comes to the island as its first scholarship student, remaining there for an entire seven years. What Mary doesn’t know is that she’s the daughter abandoned 15 years earlier, when Nathan left her and her mother Maura—a dereliction that the contrite Nathan now fictionalizes in an autobiographical novel-in-progress (New Found Land). This dual central situation does grow wearisome (although the novel-within-the-novel is quite beautifully written), but Kennedy has the good sense to keep distracting our attention from its redundancy with sharp portrayals of Nathan’s companions (including a hilariously disturbed “performance poet” and a good-natured mutt named Eckless), the most fully realized of whom is his alcoholic editor and drinking buddy, the affably self-destructive Jack Grace. The focus, though, keeps returning to Nathan’s patient stewardship of Mary’s sensibility and career (each year she spends under his tutelage is dedicated to following one of Nathan’s gnomic “rules”—such as “Pay attention to everything,” and “Do it for love”). Brief emphases on Mary’s upbringing (by her gay uncle and his love, in a small Welsh village) provide additional variation, but do not make her particularly believable as a budding writer (she’s actually a fairly generic 19-year-old). Oddly, it doesn’t matter: the tangle of secrecy, guilt, and irrational hope that underlies Nathan’s Prospero-like guardianship of the daughter he yearns to acknowledge makes of their intricate double story a moving illustration of “the impossibility of creation without love.”
Not Kennedy’s shapeliest or subtlest book, but probably her best yet.Pub Date: July 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40791-X
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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
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