Thoughtful and interesting, if something less than a complete success. One hopes that more of this English-born Welsh...
An independent scholar has an obsessive interest in the mysteries of Shakespeare’s identity, and the eponymous Elizabethan society somehow related to him.
Protagonist Sean Tallow works as a news editor for the BBC—until a cost-cutting decision sends him reeling through a succession of unfulfilling jobs and unresolved relationships with women, then a reunion with his boyhood friend Dan Pagett, a no-nonsense business tycoon who’s always been loftily amused by Sean’s stubborn bookishness. Wall (Bless the Thief, 1998) works hard at making connections between the intrigues that Dan involves Sean in (largely consisting of illegally circumventing customs regulations). But the most interesting parts of the story are those in which Sean uncovers information about the “School of Night” briefly mentioned in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost: an “underground” group of intellectuals whose members included poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe, scientist and mathematician Thomas Hariot, and that fascinating, tragic polymath Dr. John Dee (who might be considered the Elizabethan Aristotle). There’s authentic mystery in the buried facts about “this glittering cohort of human daring and folly,” self-proclaimed Faustian seekers who had abjured the company of women and devoted themselves to understanding all the secrets of the universe. Wall keeps us interested in Sean Tallow primarily because Tallow is interested in these people, and keeps stumbling onto such delicious possibilities as the suggestion that “King Lear was effectively a coded treatise on the subject of alchemy.” The novel’s contemporary plot—albeit intermittently enlivened by adultery, smuggling, murder, and malicious satire on academic and big-business posturing—pales by comparison (though Wall does make several intriguing climactic linkages between Dan Pagett’s bluff amorality and Sean Tallow’s entrapment in his very own “Jacobean tragedy”).
Thoughtful and interesting, if something less than a complete success. One hopes that more of this English-born Welsh author’s fiction will eventually arrive Over Here.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28778-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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