Finch treats serious issues whimsically without being flippant, to deeply entertaining effect.
A fast-paced, bizarre, iconoclastic farce anchored by an endearing filial relationship between a journalist and his assistant.
Finch’s novel follows Arthur Magpie—abrasive, highbrow, English journalist and high-functioning, chain-smoking alcoholic—who almost always calls his assistant “darling” and crashes his automobile into something on almost every road. The narrator of the tale is Arthur’s assistant, Ian Swansea, who recounts in an author’s note that he was employed by Mr. Magpie from 2002-2010, following their first chance encounter during an incident involving stampeding bulls, loose from a staged apocalypse complete with ceremonial robes and a Venetian mask. Finch’s book is exhaustively funny; as Arthur and Ian move from assignment to assignment, there are book jokes, philosophy jokes, smutty jokes, pratfalls and shtick, and wild plot turns around every corner. The story is as outlandish as its chapter titles, which include “Another Donkey Holiday,” “Disco Cupcakes” and “Burning the Ken.” The one-liners are riotous—“Christ was a lot of things, but he was a socialist first and foremost”—and lampooned versions of political figures and authors, the targets of Arthur’s cutting pen or irreverent tongue, are amusing. But the strongest laughs come from the work Finch puts into developing Arthur and Ian’s rapport. Most of the novel reads like an idea for a whodunit drowned in Benzedrine and barbiturates and re-imagined as a satire of the last few decades. Without the genuinely caring master-acolyte relationship, the book is multidirectional to the point of being a bit of a blur. So many characters are introduced and continents traversed, literally and metaphorically, that the loose plot doesn’t unwind until the end of Chapter 5 (out of 10), “After Hours in the Afterlife,” when it’s revealed that the death threat Arthur received earlier was perpetrated by a former student, and that the story racing toward resolution, peaceful or bloody, regards the plot on Arthur’s life. Through it all, Arthur doesn’t stop for air, and readers won’t either, so long as they don’t mind diversions.
Finch treats serious issues whimsically without being flippant, to deeply entertaining effect.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615540122
Page Count: -
Publisher: Carrier Pigeon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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