Parmelee draws the depth and range of pedophilia and sexual slavery into an appalling light.
Parmelee’s understated thriller tackles a pedophilic, child-trafficking syndicate in Thailand.
Parmelee, who teaches English in Thailand, sticks close to home by setting his story in a school—a Roman Catholic scholarship school—in Bangkok, where Ignatius “Ig” Fylchworthy is a member of the staff. Through a series of sinister and grisly happenings, Ig discovers that his school is a hotbed of student sexual molestation. For the most part, Parmelee keeps the story running in the shadows, like a 1940s noir movie, and the inscrutable foreign climes make it all the more so. His writing can be strangely elliptical at times (“ ‘Yes, Sister had lunch in,’ she said, but spoke much more than this, somehow, though in an odd and very inexplicable way”) and wordy at others, but on the whole Parmelee keeps the drama perking along. Ig is a full character, if at the expense of other players who must express their personality through dialogue (“Hey, buddy, that was awesome! I’m so proud of you I could bawl, dude!”); he is a talented teacher who cannily uses his classroom to elicit information about the predation, far from a hero (“I was worried there might be something diabolical in their planning for me”) and with his own issues handling sexual appetite. But in his rage against the syndicate, he is a gratifying force for good. Parmelee is clearly at ease with his Thai locale and able to generate a realistic Catholic school atmosphere, even providing a host of colorful nuggets such as the school’s statues weeping tears of blood. An extended sting operation set up by Ig allows Parmelee to explore how syndicates like this go about their vile work, and his final speech evolves into a plea—and a commonsensical one, considering the circumstances—to relax the unnatural sexual restrictions placed on men and women of the church.
Parmelee draws the depth and range of pedophilia and sexual slavery into an appalling light.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2006
ISBN: 978-0557501328
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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