A dystopian novel in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale, viewed through the children who suffer from our mistakes.
The elusive and ever evolving Ball (Census, 2018, etc.) returns with a radical new novel about a divisive future that takes inequality to grotesque extremes.
If they don’t teach Ball’s work in college by now, they should, if only as an example of an author whose books are so different from one another that a reader might not even recognize them as the work of one person save for Ball’s spare prose, eccentric imagination, and pinpoint narrative composition. Perhaps he’s a collective, like Banksy. The story opens with students Lethe and Lois in class the day before a mysterious holiday called Ogias’ Day, which hasn’t happened in more than 50 years. Through their discussions with their drunk, grieving teacher, Mandred, we learn more about their world. Some time ago, an influx of refugees triggered a politician to suggest an extreme solution: They can come in, “as long as we can tell them apart.” Over time, this led to the development of a lower caste of people with no legal standing, all branded with a tattoo of a red hat on their faces, and forced to amputate their thumbs. Any legal citizen, “Pats,” can also kill these “quads” at any time, but on Ogias’ day, the tables are turned. From here, the story flips through different characters in different circumstances but all set in this curious new societal matrix. We learn about a child sacrifice ceremony called the Infanta and about the titular Divers' Game, a legendary and highly risky channel by which children might escape their fate. It’s imaginatively horrifying, even if it doesn’t always make sense, and readers who appreciate Ball’s keen, melancholic, and often sadly satirical view of human society will likely appreciate this timely assessment of where division might take us and how it affects the generations that come after us.
A dystopian novel in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale, viewed through the children who suffer from our mistakes.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-267610-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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