Winner of Ireland's largest literary award for the best book of 1989, Banville's latest is an elegantly written, often darkly comic meditation upon evil and guilt—and a great imaginative leap beyond his previous efforts (Kepler, 1983, etc.). Frederick Charles St. John Vandveld Montgomery has returned to Ireland in a desperate search for money. Earlier, living with his wife on a Mediterranean island with no visible means of support, he blackmailed a drug-pusher into giving him a loan. When Frederick welshed on the debt, the man behind the pusher, Senor Aguirre, prevented the wife from leaving the island and threatened to kill her if Frederick didn't come up with the payment. Frederick, having come to Ireland, visits his mother in the countryside, where she is raising Connemara ponies, but there is no money to be had. Then Frederick kidnaps a young woman—a housemaid—in the course of a robbery and kills her ("It's not easy to wield a hammer in a motor car"). On the run, he falls in with a wise old family friend, Charlie French, who puts him up in his house unaware of the murder. Eventually, Frederick is spotted by a shopgirl and denounced to the police. While on remand awaiting trial, haunted by moral ambiguity, he writes this book of evidence, grappling with his life itself. ("Does the court realize, I wonder, what this confession is costing me?") Frederick begins to see that Charlie's well-meaning placing of him in a sinecure was the beginning of his downfall: always taking the easy way out has left him defenseless against the temptations of the world. There are still those who would help him get off—Charlie supplies him with the best defense lawyer in Ireland—but Frederick struggles to find meaningful guilt for his awful deed. A novel of high moral seriousness, gracefully written—one that lingers on in the mind long after it is read.
Pub Date: April 1, 1990
ISBN: 0375725237
Page Count: -
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990
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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