Though with plenty of good moments, this ranks as lesser work by an author who’s done much better.
If you can see the end coming from a long way off, do you rush toward it or head in the opposite direction? Therein lies a question to be wrestled with—and so St. Aubyn (On the Edge, 2014, etc.) does.
Charlie Fairburn, the screenwriter of such immortal flicks as Aliens with a Human Heart (“perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it”), has six months to live. Does he head out to sail around the world, climb great peaks, see the most important museums in the most beautiful cities? Nope. Now that he’s put aside the possibility of killing himself for a minute or two, Charlie nurses ambitions that are somewhat less involved: he decides he’s going to write the novel he dreamed about when he was young, explore the ideas that captivated him in college. Never mind that his agent will go ballistic: there are ways of working around Arnie Cornfield, whose name and manner are clichés as much as are his words, even if St. Aubyn doesn’t quite have American English, and especially Hollywood American English, down. (“The audience have gotta leave the movie with a smile on their faces,” he writes, Britishly.) Prozac and potage in tummy, Charlie sets to work, penning a yarn that reeks of Waiting for Godot and undergraduate courses in the nature of consciousness and suchlike things: “She hardly recognized the argumentative intellectual she had driven to psychedelic insanity in the Utah desert five years ago, the man who declared the ‘scandal’ of pure Being, and ‘announced the death of Nature.’ ” Charlie’s slim novel is and will always be an acquired taste, but it makes a nice distraction while he’s waiting for the end. But did someone say deus ex machina? St. Aubyn turns in a curious confection, well-crafted as always but rather insubstantial for all its philosophical explorations; it’s certainly more cheerful than his Melrose novels (At Last, 2012, etc.), but even though it’s still brimming with mordant humor and venom (and, for that matter, plenty of inside jokes to please faithful readers), it seems a detour from the weightier, psychologically richer stuff of old.
Though with plenty of good moments, this ranks as lesser work by an author who’s done much better.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04603-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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