An intelligent fiction debut by a capable writer.
Award-winning journalist Emerson (Gaza, 1991, etc.) tries her hand at fiction with a story that draws on her knowledge of the Third World.
Like Graham Greene, a central if off-stage figure here, Emerson has spent significant time in such outposts of upheaval as Vietnam, the Gaza Strip, and, most recently, Algeria. Here, the protagonist, Molly Benson, is a wealthy, well-intentioned eccentric, obsessed with Greene and eager to do good. She met Greene once and corresponded with him for many years until his death in 1991. Molly’s brother, a leftist freelance journalist, was killed under mysterious circumstances in El Salvador. Now she’s preparing for the latest is a series of self-devised humanitarian missions: a trip to Algeria to give money to writers and intellectuals threatened by the Islamic fundamentalists engaged in a guerrilla war against the equally repressive “socialist” regime there. She’s accompanied by an unlikely pair—her lifelong friend, the childish Bertie, and Toby, a portly, loquacious English graduate student. Putting this trio into the volatile conditions in Algeria is a recipe for disaster and, naturally, each of their good deeds leads to torment for some unsuspecting victim of their largesse. If this sounds like one of Greene’s mordant fables of foolish innocents abroad, wreaking unintended havoc with their liberal good intentions, that’s obviously not an accident. Emerson invokes Greene repeatedly here, not only in Molly’s constant musings on his life and work but in her own stylish prose and satisfyingly sound plot construction. There are moments when the novel reads a little too much like a newspaper synopsis of the Algerian situation or a quickie recap of Greene’s major themes, but such lapses are mercifully few. And despite the temptation to reduce Molly to a caricature, Emerson never fails to convey the pain underneath her heroine’s fumbling goodwill.
An intelligent fiction debut by a capable writer.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-46324-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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 soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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