Young concludes, “Nothing has ever made much sense in this part of the world.” Regrettably, his novel doesn’t make much...
While the title echoes The Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984, Mullaney’s debut novel is grounded in contemporary Mideast politics—most of the action takes place during 1984, at the midpoint of the Iran-Iraq war.
American journalist Michael Young is invited to visit Iraq to report on the war. His perspective is doomed to remain “official”; he is squired around by a government-sponsored “minder” and has no freedom to do the kind of hard-headed independent journalism he would like to do. He reconnects romantically with another reporter, Daniella Burkett, an American conveniently of Iraqi descent. Part of the novel is relayed from Michael’s point of view, and part is a third-person account of Ibrahim Galeb Al-Mansur, an artist working for the Iraqi government. While Al-Mansur’s artistic talents allow him to paint glorified portraits of Saddam Hussein by day, the novel traces his growing incendiary (literally) radicalism. The alternating “voices” and chronological fragmentation give the novel the illusion of complexity, but the characters are as thin as cardboard and as flat as a sidewalk, and too often we cringe at Young’s (Mullaney’s?) tin ear: “The opinions and positions he took with such a boisterous condescendence toward anything to the contrary were extremely dangerous”; “there is no time for pensive reflection” (as opposed another kind?). Even Daniella, who wins a Pulitzer for her reporting on a chemical attack of a Kurdish village, speaks woodenly.
Young concludes, “Nothing has ever made much sense in this part of the world.” Regrettably, his novel doesn’t make much sense either.Pub Date: May 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-35446-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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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