FATHER SKY

by Devery Freeman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 18, 1979

Would the brainwashed boys at a New Jersey military academy really take armed control of the school when their commander is arrested for shooting an anti-gun demonstrator? And would the journalist father of a nine-year-old involved in this danger not remove his son because of a desire to hang around and help resolve the whole situation? Only an unusually hypnotic storyteller could give these implausibilities either credibility or fanciful conviction--and first-novelist Freeman, though he makes newsmagazine-man Harry Auden a chattily pleasant enough narrator, is too wishy-washy in both thematics and style to animate this tenuous satire-fable. Auden has come to visit son Charlie at Peddington Academy (Auden's own alma mater), and when he discovers that anti-gun demonstrators are picketing outside the academy gates, he watches what happens when the mad school superintendent shoots one of the picketers: the authorities demand that the school surrender its armaments, but the regimented students--led by a charismatic and noble teenager--not only refuse but flaunt their gunpower and demand the release of their leader. How to get the kids to give in? A super-psychologist is brought in to analyze the military-school psyche (""We must discover who it is that can demand obedience under the threat of castration""), but meanwhile bloody sniper warfare is breaking out between the military kids and the locals. Only when a Patton-like general arrives to give the kids orders can the siege be ended. This nightmare-cartoon scenario might possibly work in a surrealistic film version (like Lindsay Anderson's If); but here, undermined by Auden's fuzzy motivations and the mundane cutesiness of his affair with a sexy protester, it's neither amusing nor frightening nor especially on-target about guns and violence--just foolish, annoyingly unconvincing, and rather dated to boot.

Pub Date: Dec. 18, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION