A genuinely eerie tale, in a perfect setting and told with just the right amount of ambiguity.
Scottish novelist Thompson (Pandora’s Box, 1999, etc.) travels to a remote island where a lighthouse-keeper, a shipwreck survivor, and several ghosts try their best to get along.
In 1826, for a retired seaman, lighthouse-keeping looked like a pretty cushy job. You got free rent, the work was easy, and almost all of your salary was clear profit. Cameron Black, the keeper at Jacob’s Rock (a barren isle off the west coast of Scotland) was very happy there. The loneliness that everyone considered the hardest part of the life didn’t bother Cameron: he was happy to spend his free hours studying the Bible, and he had lately been sent an assistant (Simon) to share his duties. Younger than Cameron, Simon was less used to the solitary life, but he adjusted to the routine and became a reliable companion. But their quiet bachelor existence changed overnight when Cameron discovered a young woman washed ashore on the beach. Nude (save for a locket around her neck), unconscious, and barely alive, the woman is nursed back to life but cannot recall who she is or how she got there. Cameron names her Lucia (the name of the ship pictured inside her locket) and decides to keep her on the island until she has recovered her wits. That doesn’t promise to be any day soon: Lucia appears sane and manages to take charge of many of the household tasks, but she is prey to strange visions and hallucinations. She sees people (a ship captain, a mulatto girl) and things (an empty ship) that don’t exist, and she hears distant voices crying out at night. Are these just the product of her confusion, or could they be the ghosts of the slaves kept there when the island was a secret outpost of the slave trade? And why won’t Cameron let Lucia return to the mainland? In most ghost stories, you are sure at least of who is being haunted. Here it becomes murkier as you go along.
A genuinely eerie tale, in a perfect setting and told with just the right amount of ambiguity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31810-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.
Short-story virtuoso Saunders' (Tenth of December, 2013, etc.) first novel is an exhilarating change of pace.
The bardo is a key concept of Tibetan Buddhism: a middle, or liminal, spiritual landscape where we are sent between physical lives. It's also a fitting master metaphor for Saunders’ first novel, which is about suspension: historical, personal, familial, and otherwise. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president, sort of, although he is not yet dead. Rather, he is in a despair so deep it cannot be called mere mourning over his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid in 1862. Saunders deftly interweaves historical accounts with his own fragmentary, multivoiced narration as young Willie is visited in the netherworld by his father, who somehow manages to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, at least temporarily. But the sneaky brilliance of the book is in the way Saunders uses these encounters—not so much to excavate an individual’s sense of loss as to connect it to a more national state of disarray. 1862, after all, was the height of the Civil War, when the outcome was far from assured. Lincoln was widely seen as being out of his depth, “a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” Among Saunders’ most essential insights is that, in his grief over Willie, Lincoln began to develop a hard-edged empathy, out of which he decided that “the swiftest halt to the [war] (therefore the greatest mercy) might be the bloodiest.” This is a hard truth, insisting that brutality now might save lives later, and it gives this novel a bitter moral edge. For those familiar with Saunders’ astonishing short fiction, such complexity is hardly unexpected, although this book is a departure for him stylistically and formally; longer, yes, but also more of a collage, a convocation of voices that overlap and argue, enlarging the scope of the narrative. It is also ruthless and relentless in its evocation not only of Lincoln and his quandary, but also of the tenuous existential state shared by all of us. Lincoln, after all, has become a shade now, like all the ghosts who populate this book. “Strange, isn’t it?” one character reflects. “To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors utterly forgotten?”
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9534-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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