Erudite and graceful, but this one somehow loses its point halfway through, running on and on to no apparent end.
From Welsh novelist Wall (The School of Night, 2002, etc.), an odd, meandering account of a wayward seminarian’s attempts to uncover the mysteries surrounding a mad 18th-century poet,.
With the solitary exception of Stalin, seminary dropouts rarely go on to achieve much in the way of worldly success. Christopher Bayliss is a case in point: a meek and tentative Englishman, Christopher spent several years in Rome preparing for his ordination only to chuck it all at the last minute with no very clear idea of what he would do instead. He returned to Britain and enrolled as a graduate student at Leeds, where he began to research the life of one Richard Pelham, an obscure poet of the Augustan Age as renowned in his own time for his madness as for his verse. Christopher finds Pelham at once repellent and fascinating, and he continues his investigations even after quarreling with his adviser and dropping out of the university. He becomes a sales rep with a printing firm that specializes in making reproductions of museum prints, eventually rises to director of the company, then gets forced out when his immediate supervisor is found to be a swindler and embezzler. After he’s injured in a car crash, Christopher goes home to live with his mother and continue his research while living on his disability benefits. As he delves deeper into the life of Pelham, he becomes convinced that the man suffered not from madness but from demonic possession, and Christopher finds himself pressed once more into the deepest recesses of Catholic theology as he attempts to make some sense of the poor man’s maladies. But eventually the question arises: Is Christopher trying to understand Pelham, or himself? The demons that have possessed Christopher may not require exorcism, but they do demand a long-postponed coming to terms with his past. Sooner or later, a reckoning will need to be made.
Erudite and graceful, but this one somehow loses its point halfway through, running on and on to no apparent end.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28772-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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