Long known for his satirical bent, South African writer Hope (Black Swan, 1987, etc.) here merrily turns colonialism inside out, sending a Bushman on a mission to the Queen of England—a perilous journey indeed among the hostile, uncivilized natives in that sodden land. The story, set in 1993, is narrated, in the unflappable tradition of 19th-century-explorer narratives, by David Mungo Booi, selected by his people to visit the Queen (he's the only one with a knowledge of English) to remind her of her grandmother Victoria's pledge to protect them from harm. But David's misadventures begin as soon as he reaches England. Waylaid at customs and transported to a detention center, he persists in believing it a royal guesthouse until he's led out in shackles to be deported. Saved on the tarmac by a defrocked Anglican Bishop claiming to be his sponsor, David quickly learns the limits of English hospitality when the man's daughter takes too keen an interest in him. Betrayed by his host to a local lord who keeps an African menagerie on his estate, David becomes the object of a hunt himself one day, and only a rescue by a band of New Age gypsies keeps him from the hounds. Further detours can't keep him from his royal mission, and he revisits the ex-Bishop for his gear—among which is a pouch of gems. The sight of the treasure transforms his frothing ex-host into an unctuous, anxious adviser. Cashing them in for a satchel of banknotes, the man of God travels to London with David, persuades him to spend freely to obtain his goal, then departs. In time, however, having emptied his satchel without the desired end, David sneaks into Buckingham Palace, where he finally manages to see the Queen—who isn't quite what he expected. An oddity, ample and keen of wit, and with some wonderful moments—but its droll, sharp, sometimes despairing tone is only sporadically sustained.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-04040-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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