Allende’s tale risks but resists descending into melodrama at every turn. The up-to-date, even postmodern ending makes for a...
A graceful imagining of the saber-wielding, justice-dispensing freedom fighter of yore.
Children of the ’50s may happily remember Guy Williams’s TV portrayal of the legendary Zorro, who carved his signature initial into his enemies’ flesh with the point of his sword and kept the entire Spanish army in Alta California busily searching for him. Latter-day Californian Allende (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004, etc.) provides a backstory that brims with modern concerns: In her hands, Zorro is an ever-so-slightly tormented revolutionary whose sense of justice comes from the accident of his birth. The child of a Spanish officer and a Shoshone Indian woman, Diego de la Vega grows up with a profound knowledge of the injustices wrought by Europeans on California’s native peoples. He takes his vulpine identity—zorro is Spanish for "fox"—early on, after a fox delivers him from danger; says his grandmother, helpfully, "That zorro is your totemic animal, your spiritual guide. . . . You must cultivate its skill, its cleverness, its intelligence." He does, reaching adolescence "with no great vices or virtues, except for a disproportionate love of justice, though whether that is a vice or a virtue, I am not sure." A Rousseauian child of nature, de la Vega travels to Spain to acquire a continental education. Becoming radicalized in the bargain, he defies the country’s Napoleonic rulers and joins an underground alliance to battle them, then takes the fight back to America. But first de la Vega must endure being shanghaied by pirates, who, neatly enough, haul him before the legendary über-pirate Jean Lafitte for a parlay. He acquires yet more education in the bayous, then makes for California once more to visit mayhem on corrupt officialdom on behalf of truth, justice and the Spanish way of life.
Allende’s tale risks but resists descending into melodrama at every turn. The up-to-date, even postmodern ending makes for a nice touch, too, and will gladden the heart of anyone ready in his or her heart to carve a few Zs into the bad guys.Pub Date: May 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-077897-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.
Two women, two Greek tragedies, one modern revamping.
British classicist Haynes writes a rejoinder—in fiction—to the near muteness of women in ancient Western texts. As she did with her psychological thriller, The Furies (2014), Haynes dives straight for Sophocles’ monumental plays. This time, she puts a mother and daughter on center stage instead of Sophocles’ title characters in Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone. Each woman has “the sense that someone was nearby, wishing her ill.” For Queen Jocasta of Thebes, it is the housekeeper Teresa, whose wickedness puts Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca to shame. For Jocasta’s youngest child, Ismene, the menace arrives in the first chapter. An orphan from age 5, the bookish 15-year-old leaves her reading nook only to be knifed by a stranger in the assumed safety of the palace. This thwarted political assassination dissolves into Chapter 2, which introduces Jocasta at the same age, bundled off a generation earlier to wed Thebes’ fossilized King Laius. This complex opening structure settles into chapters that alternate between the two women. The device works well, building tension as mother and daughter both struggle with confinement, treachery, politics, and hair. (Some verities apparently hold for 2.5 millennia.) After Laius dies, Jocasta becomes notorious—and thanks to Sophocles, immortal—for unwittingly marrying her son, Oedipus. This Gordian knot of incest still has the power to shock, and Haynes is deft with it and with its consequences for the next generation. Her grasp of the ancient city-state is marvelously firm. Her sturdy sentences conjure the punishing Greek summer heat that quells movement and the gold rings bunching the fat on the fingers of florid men. But unlike the classically inspired novels of Madeline Miller or Colm Tóibín, antiquity bogs down in Haynes’ expository prose. And while the author adds an intriguing new character, the physician Sophon who is instrumental to both mother and daughter, the women themselves remain too flat on the page.
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60945-480-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached...
An Artist of the Floating World featured Japanese characters; here, Ishiguro breaks new ground with a slow-moving rumination on the world of the English country-house butler.
For 35 years, Stevens was Lord Darlington's butler, giving faithful service. Now, in 1956, Darlington Hall has a new, American owner, and Stevens is taking a short break to drive to the West Country and visit Mrs. Benn, the housekeeper until she left the Hall to get married. The novel is predominantly flashbacks to the '20s and '30s, as Stevens evaluates his profession and concludes that "dignity" is the key to the best butlering; beyond that, a great butler devotes himself "to serving a great gentleman—and through the latter, to serving humanity." He considers he "came of age" as a butler in 1923, when he successfully oversaw an international conference while his father, also a butler, lay dying upstairs. A second key test came in 1936, when the housekeeper announced her engagement (and departure) during another major powwow. Each time, Stevens felt triumphant—his mask of professional composure never slipped. Yet two things become clear as Stevens drives West. Lord Darlington, as a leading appeaser of Hitler, is now an utterly discredited figure; far from "serving humanity," Stevens had misplaced his trust in an employer whose life was "a sad waste." As for the housekeeper, she had always loved Stevens, but failed to penetrate his formidable reserve; and at their eventual, climactic meeting, which confirms that it's too late for both of them, he acknowledges to himself that the feeling was mutual.
This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached prose; yet there is something doomed about Ishiguro's effort to enlist sympathy for such a self-censoring stuffed shirt, and in the end he can manage only a small measure of pathos for his disappointed servant.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1989
ISBN: 0679731725
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
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