The fallen priest is an old story, but newcomer York’s searing images mark her as a talent to watch.
Two devout Catholics, yielding to temptation, destroy three lives in this intermittently powerful first novel, a Canadian counterpart to Southern Gothic.
It’s June 1948 in Mercy, Manitoba, and Thomas Rose, the good-hearted butcher, is about to marry Mathilda Nickels, just turned 19. Mathilda spent her first nine years in an orphanage before being rescued by her aunt Vera, housekeeper to Mercy’s Catholic priest, who has just died. His replacement, Father August Day, marries the butcher and his bride. August is 26 but old in his ways and bathed in religious zeal, and that’s what captivates Mathilda, who shuns Thomas on their wedding night, pleading her period (a lie). When she confesses to the priest, all he can think is: Virgin! August knows all about the sins of the flesh. His loving mother Aggie was the town whore after her man had run off and she had to support herself and her son. Yet he cannot resist Mathilda’s advances and deflowers her in the sacristy, then immediately cuts off all contact. Mathilda becomes pregnant and, panic-stricken, offers herself at last to the long-suffering Thomas. Her panic returns as she is about to give birth: Who will the baby resemble? York tells this story of solitary souls driven to extremes in dozens of short takes, including glimpses of the town drunk, Castor, who lives hermit-like in a nearby bog and has truth-revealing visions. The wrenching climax will leave Mathilda and August dead and Thomas a broken man. But we’re not done. The novel’s final third jumps forward to 2003 in an overlong postscript about an encounter in the bog between Mary, Castor’s adopted daughter, and another clergyman, this time a slick, skirt-chasing evangelist, a far cry from the tormented August. These new characters have their problems, but the reader, powers of empathy depleted after that climax, will have little left over for them.
The fallen priest is an old story, but newcomer York’s searing images mark her as a talent to watch.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-883285-25-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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