A complex story exploring the moral repercussions of acting or not acting.
Another well-researched psychologically astute novel from Rogers (Island, 2000, etc.).
An intriguing counterpoint is set up here between the present and the past. In 1999, Anne Harrington is taking the body of her father, a vicar, by ship from Nigeria to England for burial; and, while aboard the ship, she reads her father’s Nigeria journals, set in the early 1960s, when he was a missionary there. Wandering at night on the ship, Anne discovers Joseph, a Nigerian stowaway, who leads her to his deathly ill pregnant wife and begs her to keep their presence secret. Anne’s naiveté leads to disastrous results. She tries to help, giving the woman antibiotics and enlisting the first mate—who, seizing upon his advantage, beds her and then tells her the whole crew knows she is a “slag.” Shamed, and with no recourse, she’s incapable of finding out what has happened to the woman and her unborn child; all she knows is that crew members hate stowaways because they’re fined if a ship is found carrying them. Anne doesn’t reveal where Joseph is, and hopes that he has survived the voyage. Meanwhile, in her father’s journal, she discovers his secrets: after she was born, he had gotten a Nigerian woman pregnant and been removed from his position; her mother had had an affair with his boss; this is why he never visited them after the divorce. Given a second chance, he ends up in Biafra, caring for the mangled soldiers and starving children of the civil war. Back home in England, Anne is able to track down Joseph, who has indeed made it to England, but he wants nothing to do with her. Filled with guilt, she suffers a breakdown. In a final twist, four years later, she ends up married, submissive once again, and struggling to bear a child. In her father’s journal, she discovers a final secret: on his last day alive, her father learned that his Nigerian daughter had been sold into prostitution in Italy.
A complex story exploring the moral repercussions of acting or not acting.Pub Date: July 20, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-509-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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