Irresistible, and deeply satisfying. Donoghue has surpassed herself.
This boldly imagined historical fiction—reminiscent, though by no means imitative, of both Defoe’s classic Moll Flanders and Margaret Atwood’s recent Alias Grace—represents a quantum leap forward for its Irish-born (now Canadian) author.
The antiheroine and protagonist is Mary Saunders, a young woman whose ingenuous lust for “fine clothing” (e.g., the “slammerkin,” which denotes both a loose gown and a “loose woman”) leads her into prostitution and murder. Donoghue (Stir-Fry, 1994; Hood, 1996) has triumphantly reimagined the life of a real historical figure of whom nothing is known beyond those few facts—beginning with Mary’s lonely London girlhood, and expulsion from her stepfather’s home when she becomes pregnant at 14; continuing throughout her thriving career as an “independent” whore, and retirement, as a charity-case “Penitent”; then climaxing at the country home of clothiers Thomas and Jane Jones, who employ and befriend Mary until her past rears its head and sets the servant against her masters in a violent and bloody resolution of their “differences.” It’s a harrowing, abundantly detailed chronicle of woman’s fate, sharply attentive to both class conflict and individual psychology, enlivened by such superbly realized figures as the willful child-woman Mary, her rough-hewn fellow prostitute and mentor Doll Higgins, and especially her eventual victim Jane Jones: a remarkable amalgam of silliness, benevolence, selflessness, and utter vulnerability. The story’s range of emotion and implication is further broadened by a masterly narrative choice: Mary’s doomed stay with the Joneses is shown through the eyes of all the characters who are affected, in fact afflicted, by her ingrained amorality and determination to have what she desires whatever the cost. Only in overstressing the weary half-truth that respectable married women and fallen women alike “sell” themselves to men does Donoghue stumble—and that’s a scarcely detectable blemish on a rich, vibrant canvas that brings the age of Hogarth and Richardson stunningly to life.
Irresistible, and deeply satisfying. Donoghue has surpassed herself.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100672-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Although this novel’s reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book.
On an island off the South Korean coast, an ancient guild of women divers reckons with the depredations of modernity from 1938 to 2008 in See's (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, 2017, etc.) latest novel.
The women divers of Jeju Island, known as haenyeo, don't display the usual female subservience. Empowered by the income they derive from their diving, harvesting seafood to consume and sell, haenyeo are heads of households; their husbands mind the children and do menial chores. Young-sook, See’s first-person narrator and protagonist, tells of her family and her ill-fated friendship with Mi-ja, who, rescued from neglectful relatives by Sun-sil, Young-sook’s mother, is initiated into the diving collective headed by Sun-sil. The girls grow up together, dive together, and go on lucrative assignments in the freezing waters near Vladivostok, Russia. They are also married off together, Mi-ja to Sang-mun, who, as World War II progresses, is enriched by collaborating with the Japanese, and Young-sook to Jun-bu, a neighbor and childhood playmate. The novel’s first half is anecdotal and a little tedious as the minutiae of the haenyeo craft are explored: free diving, pre-wetsuit diving garb, and sumbisori, the art of held breath. As two tragedies prove, the most prized catches are the riskiest: octopus and abalone. See did extensive research with primary sources to detail not only the haenyeo traditions, but the mass murders on Jeju beginning in 1948, which were covered up for decades by the South Korean government. As Jeju villages are decimated, Young-sook loses half her family and also, due to a terrible betrayal, her friendship with Mi-ja. The tangled web of politics and tyranny, not to mention the inaction of U.N. and American occupiers leading up to the massacres, deserves its own work, perhaps nonfiction. In the context of such horrors, the novel’s main source of suspense, whether Young-sook can forgive Mi-ja, seems beside the point.
Although this novel’s reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5485-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...
Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.
At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
