What do you do if you’re 8 and your father tells you the rest of the world has been annihilated and home is now a hut in the middle of nowhere? That's the situation in a British novelist’s intriguing debut.
Wealthy concert pianist Ute Bischoff scandalized the music world when she married James Hillcoat, a teenager eight years her junior who stood in one night as the page-turner of her music score. Their daughter, Peggy, grows up in a comfortable home in London, where her father belongs to an odd group called the North London Retreaters: “We have seen the future and disaster is coming; but we are the saved.” Their conversation is all about survivalism, and one of them stresses the need for a “bug-out location.” When Ute leaves for a concert tour, James takes 8-year-old Peggy off to Europe, following a map to a spot deep in the German mountains where a tumbledown shelter is bounded by high peaks and rushing rivers. This is their new home. James tells Peggy that her mother is dead and the rest of the world has been obliterated, and the child slowly accustoms herself to their life of privation in the forest. Father and daughter barely survive their first winter but learn to subsist on what they can grow, hunt, forage and preserve. As the years pass and the teen years arrive, however, Peggy becomes aware of someone else in her life, a stranger who begins to edge her away from her increasingly unhinged parent.
Fuller’s compelling coming-of-age story, narrated from the perspective of Peggy’s return to civilization, is delivered in translucent prose. Although attuned readers will likely have foreseen the final revelations, this is memorable first work from a talent to watch.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941040-01-0
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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This is good Hemingway. It has some of the tenderness of A Farewell to Arms and some of its amazing power to make one feel inside the picture of a nation at war, of the people experiencing war shorn of its glamor, of the emotions that the effects of war — rather than war itself — arouse. But in style and tempo and impact, there is greater resemblance to The Sun Also Rises. Implicit in the characters and the story is the whole tragic lesson of Spain's Civil War, proving ground for today's holocaust, and carrying in its small compass, the contradictions, the human frailties, the heroism and idealism and shortcomings. In retrospect the thread of the story itself is slight. Three days, during which time a young American, a professor who has taken his Sabbatical year from the University of Montana to play his part in the struggle for Loyalist Spain and democracy. He is sent to a guerilla camp of partisans within the Fascist lines to blow up a strategic bridge. His is a complex problem in humanity, a group of undisciplined, unorganized natives, emotionally geared to go their own way, while he has a job that demands unreasoning, unwavering obedience. He falls in love with a lovely refugee girl, escaping the terrors of a fascist imprisonment, and their romance is sharply etched against a gruesome background. It is a searing book; Hemingway has done more to dramatize the Spanish War than any amount of abstract declamation. Yet he has done it through revealing the pettinesses, the indignities, the jealousies, the cruelties on both sides, never glorifying simply presenting starkly the belief in the principles for which these people fought a hopeless war, to give the rest of the world an interval to prepare. There is something of the implacable logic of Verdun in the telling. It's not a book for the thin-skinned; it has more than its fill of obscenities and the style is clipped and almost too elliptical for clarity at times. But it is a book that repays one for bleak moments of unpleasantness.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1940
ISBN: 0684803356
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1940
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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