A deceptively simple, clear-eyed story that should find its sympathetic Gullivers.
The revolt of the Houyhnhnms against the Yahoos forms the essential allegorical plot behind fantasist Emshwiller’s astutely crafted, occasionally maudlin latest, on the tail of her fourth story collection (Report to the Men’s Club, p. 901).
The Hoots are the controlling humans who train, administer treats—and also punishment by poling—to their intelligent, sensitive, enslaved Mounts. These are the Sams and Sues of various pedigree—the Seattles being the strongest and most supreme, followed by the swift-footed Tennessees. Yet an insurrection has upset the order of things, and through the first-person voice of the adolescent Smiley, also called Charley, who is the carefully groomed Seattle Mount of the loyal, half-grown Little Master (a.k.a. His Excellent Excellency About-To-Be-The-Ruler-Of-Us-All), we learn that the tamed Mounts have made a violent push for freedom. Suddenly thrust into the wilds with Little Master clinging to his neck, Charley hooks up with the sire he has never known, Beauty, who is the colossally scarred, intractable Seattle and leader of the Mounts’ revolt. Charley is wary of his gruff father, smarting at his inability to love Charley’s mother, Merry Mary, with whom Beauty was forced to mate without love and whom Charley is determined to find, although he never knew her either. Together, Charley, mounted by the clueless Hoot Little Master, Beauty, and Beauty’s kind Tennessee girlfriend Jane, tough it through the wilds and try to avoid recapture by the wily, fork-tongued Hoots. Emshwiller’s peculiar, touching tale becomes a meditation on the virtues of civilization (comforts, discipline, and the principles of conformity) versus freedom and democracy. Which does Charley prefer? In the end he opts for love—and not (gasp!)—for one of his own breed. With patience and enormous affection for her four-legged characters, Emshwiller has fashioned an affecting, plausible story that manages to sidestep a heavy-handed symbolism.
A deceptively simple, clear-eyed story that should find its sympathetic Gullivers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-931520-03-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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