Despite moments of lyricism, more sensational than subtle.
Earthly paradise turns a British marriage hellish in this self-conscious, psychologically insecure novel from Benedict (The Opposite of Love, 2007, etc.).
There’s plenty of sin in Eden, in the form of the British Crown Colony of the Seychelles, mainly populated by the impoverished descendants of slaves. Minor Colonial Office employee Rupert has been sent to report on the economy of these Indian Ocean islands, a posting that requires the reluctant uprooting of wife Penelope and daughters Zara and Chloe. The novel opens with a sea voyage in 1960. Rupert, who “did not consider himself the philandering type,” flirts with another woman while Penelope is felled by seasickness; toddler Chloe, victim of her eight-year-old sister’s bullying, goes missing but then reappears without explanation. A pattern of inconsistencies and reverses continues on the island. First Penelope, previously happily married and faithful, has a grim affair with the governor. Then Rupert succumbs to his secretary Joelle, a strikingly lovely local woman who is both manipulative and sincerely affectionate. She eventually succeeds in breaking up Rupert’s marriage, then gets pregnant. Witch doctors and grigri (island magic) feature prominently as Zara plots to reunite her parents, and Joelle uses spells to drive Penelope back to England. Shifts of motivation dog the sometimes farcical story line until the novel turns darker, as the grigri finally claims a victim.
Despite moments of lyricism, more sensational than subtle.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56947-602-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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