A mixed batch from a superior craftsman.
Life is a minefield for the unsuspecting protagonists of nine wide-ranging tales.
Take the Moura family, in the title story, set in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship. Working-class folk, the Mouras have a small summer cottage on the estate of the Carvalhos, wealthy vineyard owners. After Carvalho prompts him to express his disgust for the tyrant, Moura gets a visit from the secret police. Fortunately, the regime is crumbling, and Gardiner describes a curious trajectory: The flight of the Carvalhos, the occupation of the mansion by the Mouras, and their eviction by their own daughter, married in secret to the Carvalho heir. Another trap is sprung in “Leaving Port McHair.” In 1967, in Washington, that “city of deception and stagecraft,” Paul, one of a small riverbank community of left-wing activists, is set up by an informer, while across the river in Virginia, retired widower Walter Paige is fighting a trumped-up lawsuit alleging child abuse 30 years before (“The Shape of the Past”). Young English schoolboy Tony Hoskins, crossing the dangerous Atlantic in 1941 to reach safe harbor in Canada (“The Voyage Out”), has to deal with his cabinmate’s attempts at sodomy; when his persecutor disappears overboard, Tony has a long struggle to affirm his innocence. Old Father Anthonie, a village priest in the Pyrenees seeking to protect his flock, is tripped up by the snares of the computer age (“The Doll House”). In his third collection (after The Incubator Ballroom, 1991), novelist Gardiner moves easily among the decades and the continents, though unfortunately there’s excess overlap between “Fugitive Color” (an art school in Provence) and “The Head of Farnham Hall” (a Pennsylvania girls’ school). Both involve anonymous death threats, a problem student, and an institutional reputation hanging in the balance. Gardiner is a busy writer, his controlling sensibility always in evidence, sometimes stifling his characters’ autonomy. Whether it’s Portuguese adversaries or radicals on the Potomac, they know their places in the well-choreographed dance.
A mixed batch from a superior craftsman.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-233-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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