Farewell, bloodsuckers! Hail, Azriel the Ghost! So thinks the reader plunging into Rice's latest supernatural epic, in which Azriel, the Wandering Babylonian Ghost who cannot die, replaces Rice's familiar casts of vampires and witches. The first half of the novel shows Rice (Memnoch the Devil, 1995, etc.) at her descriptive best, her purple pen limning Babylon's hanging gardens, golden passageways, and jeweled clothing. Young Azriel, a Jew who works for the Babylonian priests and whose best friend is the god Marduk, is murdered by a magician who coats Azriel's bones with heavy gold: Throughout the ages any magician who owns the bones can call forth Azriel, a rebel ghost and impudent genie. Rice imaginatively describes in depth the swimming spirit world of competing gods and ghosts who, unseen, walk the streets of Babylon, and the reader surrenders happily to their presence amid the ancient splendor. Azriel hops and skips through the centuries and through a number of masters until suddenly, seemingly unsummoned, appearing before a Fifth Avenue clothing store in time to see wealthy young Esther Belkin murdered, Azriel quickly kills the three assassins who've driven ice picks into her. But why is he here in this reelingly strange modern Babylon of skyscrapers and hurtling taxis? It's soon clear that Esther's death is the sacrifice of his own daughter to God by multibillionaire televangelist Gregory Belkin, high priest of the Temple of the Minds. Gregory has a worldwide following and is about to wipe out much of the earth's population so that he can "rise from the dead" and become the globe's Messiah. Can Azriel stop him? The novel is dedicated to GOD, who may find Rice's modern-day scenes plotted waveringly as she paddles about. Lesser readers may wish she'd stayed in Babylon, where their suspension of disbelief and her imaginative energies are at their strongest.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1613771738
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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