A clear-eyed fictional account by one of the survivors.
Belfast-born first-novelist Burns paints a scathing, rigorously unsentimental portrait of an insular, provincial-minded Northern Irish community struggling to survive through the Troubles, beginning in 1969 and stretching through the mid-’90s.
When the bombs start going off around the working-class town of Ardoyne, riven between Catholics and Protestants, Amelia Lovett and her scabby friends know that their play world has changed for good. Amelia's transplanted British cousin James Tone is sent on army duty to nearby Belfast as violence and suspicion between the warring factions mount, and his swift, “apparently motiveless” murder (he is simply walking in the wrong section of town at night) adds to the creeping sense that events are spiraling wildly out of control. By degrees Burns introduces the visceral, incriminating detail that dooms the roiling Lovett clan: with the rise of the IRA, older son Mick gets swept up into teenage gangs of drunken, vigilante, knee-capping thugs; older daughter Lizzie forms her own girl combat clique before descending into drugs and suicide; middle daughter Amelia drops out of school and takes refuge in alcohol, anorexia, and boys, while father and mother alternate from extreme brutality to utter indifference. In discrete, themed, and dated chapters, the author skillfully illustrates the disintegration of an entire community. Retributive, pathological nuns force the children to write a so-called peace poem. Vincent, a friend of Amelia’s abandoned by his mother, slips into delusions of spying and explosions. Young women scarred by their own emotional battlefields keep having babies, and the violence-numbed men rail blisteringly against independent women and outsiders. Burns never once winces or loses control of her material in this mordant, wry, unforgiving tale of the loss of innocence, for a girl and her country.
A clear-eyed fictional account by one of the survivors.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-32303-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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