A treat for aficionados of local color and connoisseurs of street life and violence. And nearly 500 pages for everyone.
Welsh’s eight-volume novel (Filth, 1999; Ecstasy, 1996, etc.) is a windy exposition lasting two decades and detailing the lives of four Scottish pals who sustain a long friendship.
In any Welsh tale, there will be the matter of diction for the reader to make an early peace with. The author’s distinctively Scottish dialect, rendered with gratingly phonic accuracy here, never quite comes smoothly, making the novel something like a journey in a vehicle that sputters badly. This one is perhaps the most peopled of Welsh’s works (and the longest): the four friends Billy, Terry, Carl, and Gally are each given full treatment—childhoods, the lives of parents, the contours of early home life in a government housing project, or “scheme.” The four unite as friends and early on are involved in a violent rugby (“fitba”) riot where a youth is slashed with a knife. There are also, as the plot reveals, the neighborhood enemies Doyle and Polmont, lifelong antagonists. Of the others, Terry becomes an unpalatable small-time businessman; Billy is a successful boxer and afterward proprietor of an upscale bar and eatery; Carl shoots to modest fame as a musician and deejay; and Gally suddenly learns he has HIV. Flashbacks reveal that a week after the death of Polmont, he had committed suicide by jumping from a bridge, and this iconic instance of mortality stands as a focal point for all subsequent losses sustained by the remaining men. In their 20s, they’re scattered apart. Their marriages are generally broken and their children fatherless; they all threaten, as Terry nicely puts it, to “fade into gray,” into the shabby, grim world of their upbringing. An unexpected encounter with pop star Kathryn Joyner succeeds in highlighting the essential goodness of the men, and the death of Carl’s father reunites them as friends.
A treat for aficionados of local color and connoisseurs of street life and violence. And nearly 500 pages for everyone.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-32215-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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