Metaphysical novelist Gardner has traveled from ancient Greece (The Wreckage of Agathon, 1970) and Beowulf (Grendel, 1971) to contemporary upstate N.Y., this time with a variegated cast which reflects the heat of the central dialogue like shattered glass. This confrontation takes place in Batavia between Clumly, the town's hapless and hairless police chief, and a madman/magician — "The Sunlight Man," a transmogrified member of the old Batavian Hodges family. "After God's withdrawal.... the ancient mechanism which made prophets arise should continue working" — hence the Sunlight Man who hits the break-up of the kingdom (symbolized by an American dynastic ethos) at the core of its flickering retreat. This would be the police, "the power failure...the black gap between the Actual and the Ideal." The prophet pursues Clumly relentlessly, while performing magic, directing murders through his Calaban, a sullen young Indian, punishing the Hodges, and talking, talking, talking of illusions, justice (and its opposite, law), of gods and men, of marriage and madness. Under the burden of a "monstrous righteousness" and humanity's delusions, "let every man know from moment to moment who he is." Eventually the several Hodges and others on the rim of the cauldron do know and recognize the terror, the emptiness of their universe — merely individual drum beats and the grinding of "invisible knives." Among those responding to the magician's sermons and demonstrations are some startling originals: a neat, respectable thief soothed by poetry; a bizarre civil rights worker; two desiccated crones; and some rather likable cops. At the dose, poor Clumly, after the death of the Sunlight Man occasioned by his final self-knowledge, tries to make sense of it all. He doesn't of course, except to wonder at "democracy...a huge aluminium dome made out of a million beams, and not a single beam is responsible." A complex and difficult fable of curiously American relevance; a book of bleak humors and raw surprises which mine — and sometimes undermine — the fictional ground with speculative brilliance.
Pub Date: Dec. 6, 1972
ISBN: 0811216705
Page Count: 722
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1972
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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