Not enough consistent magic in this extended metaphor on cultural, social and psychological conflict.
A mixed-race eight-year-old girl is haunted by her imaginary friend, family secrets and the two cultures she inhabits.
Oyeyemi’s much-publicized debut, completed shortly before her 19th birthday, enters the troubled mind of Jessamy Harrison, the “half-and-half” daughter of a Nigerian mother and British father. Nervy and alienated, Jessamy finds the world too fast and expectant. Oyeyemi drip-feeds her problems: she has trouble eating in front of strangers, is bullied at school, takes refuge in cupboards and often resorts to screaming tantrums. On a first family visit to Nigeria she meets Titiola—or TillyTilly—a friend who has magic powers but forbids Jess to talk about her: “Can’t you tell that I’m not supposed to be there.” Back home, Jess is first ill, then in difficulties again at school, so is thrilled when TillyTilly reappears, an ally who seems able to sneak invisibly into the homes of her enemies. But who is TillyTilly? A figment of Jess’s feverish brain, her alter ego, the expression of her angry or divided self? Even Jess begins to suspect her friend isn’t real, leading to TillyTilly’s revelation that Jess had a twin sister, Fern, who was stillborn. Oyeyemi ratchets up the horror as Jess begins to fear her jealous friend’s powers of invasion and destruction. Her parents respond impulsively, sometimes angrily, to the developing mayhem, leading TillyTilly to “get” Jess’s father, who falls into a depressive illness. A psychologist is brought in, but precocious Jess can see through his techniques, and TillyTilly wrecks the relationship by harming his daughter, Jess’s new friend Shivs. Narrated from Jess’s point-of-view, this ambitious psychodrama becomes repetitive in structure and can’t always sustain the adult tone. A conclusion in Nigeria attempts to knit Jess’s three worlds—the actual, the spiritual and the “Bush”—but doesn’t wholly rescue or resolve a story rich in material yet technically imbalanced.
Not enough consistent magic in this extended metaphor on cultural, social and psychological conflict.Pub Date: June 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51383-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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