An impressive, richly imagined, deeply urgent story.
An Orwellian debut explodes ancient lore and contemporary technology to create a prescient, terrifying dystopia.
In 2052, Britain has become an extreme surveillance state with pre-Victorian levels of brutal poverty. King Henry IX, aka Harry9, controls the news through WikiNous, the Internet transmitted through flesh. Alerts, text messages, and spam scroll across citizens’ corneas, with incoming messages flashing colors like a migraine aura. The ability to opt out of the spam is only available to the wealthiest. Meanwhile, with the impending arrival of the comet Urga-Rampos, Heaven’s Gate, a California-based cult run by Marshall Applewhite III, is trying to kill all of the world’s animals and perform mass suicides, an increasingly appealing prospect for the large Indigent class. Homeless 90-year-old Cuthbert Handley sets out to free the animals of the London Zoo. Suffering from an addiction to Flôt, a legal hallucinogenic with crippling withdrawal symptoms, Cuthbert believes the animals are talking to him and hopes they will help him find his brother Drystan, who drowned in 1968 and who may or may not be the Christ of the Otters. Dr. Bajwa, Cuthbert’s physician, worries Cuthbert’s delusions will get him locked away in a Calm House with a Nexar hood that would “smooth and desplinter brain activity like a kind of mental woodplane.” Conveniently, Dr. Bajwa is an amateur solarcopter pilot. This plot device is the one creak in an otherwise highly immersive narrative. The language of the novel crackles with energy, nimbly drawing on Old English, regional dialects and slang, and speculative future language. The worlds’ religions—paganism, Christianity, Sikhism, Judaism, Islam, Yoruba—fuse together in a luminous supernatural force which buoys forward poor Cuthbert, who, despite the risk of multiple-organ failure, doggedly pursues his mission to keep the voices of the animals alive.
An impressive, richly imagined, deeply urgent story.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-240079-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
PROFILES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
