Mordantly morbid.
Minimalist tale of a former violinist turned epitaph scribe, and his daughter.
More accessible than his last (The Way Through Doors, 2009), Ball’s third novel at least makes his characters’ predicament plain from the outset. A dystopian unnamed country and city are the setting. In this post-revolutionary state, systematic purges and bloodbaths have given way to everyday ambiguous incidents of what could be state-sponsored persecution or random street violence. It’s hard to tell, because the police have all become secret police—even their stations are undercover—and government agents are in disguise, principally from each other. William, who was once a virtuoso violinist before the symphonies were disbanded and music itself banned, now works writing epitaphs—quirky ones for people whose sole creative outlet these days is imagining what should be inscribed on their own or others’ tombstones. William’s 9-year-old daughter Molly is mute but gifted with a prodigious imagination. He has raised her ever since his wife Louisa was “disappeared” by the government years before. William and Molly lead a colorless but relatively placid existence, carefully avoiding drawing attention to themselves, especially by going out after evening curfew, when citizens not at home are deemed to be up to no good—whatever “good” is. However, a former friend recognizes him on the street and draws William back into a group of wine-drinking insurgents, with a promise of revelations about what really happened to Louisa. In a risky move, William leaves Molly with elderly neighbors and steals away to a subversive nighttime gathering, where he receives a precious contraband violin as well as a dossier on Louisa. As the night proceeds, Molly and the neighbors enact an elaborate puppet show, which elucidates her parents’ visionary legacy and provides her with a map of her future after the inevitable happens. In Ball’s delicately etched nightmare, there’s still room in the regime for ordinary comforts like pea soup—trouble is, the spoons are too small.
Mordantly morbid.Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-73985-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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