Toomey is aiming to do more than solve a mystery and achieves a psychologically intriguing, unnerving character study.
The Rashomon effect is at work in this anatomy of a small-town murder, with even the perpetrator offering more than one version of events.
Irish writer Toomey (Huddleston Road, 2012, etc.) plays with the sort of whodunit that reveals the who up front and goes on to explore the how and why. The book opens with a writer named Charlie Vaughan receiving a recorded first-person confession from the murderer, a schoolteacher named Albert Jackson, and a request to write a novel about his premeditated slaying of his wife. Jackson believes a fictional version derived from his testimony will help his children realize he is “not a monster.” The confession follows him through the actions of one day while his thoughts trace the course of a marriage that has deteriorated from love to annoyance to estrangement but perhaps not to bloody-minded revulsion. Toomey gives a detailed, persuasive view of an unsettled mind for which murder is far from the only recourse. The confession also reveals a self-absorbed and pompous man touched by a comic infatuation with another teacher. There’s something of Lucky Jim here in the way Jackson peppers his narrative with acerbic asides criticizing everyone around him. The book also includes witness accounts from a student, a teacher, a barista, and policemen, among others, as well as conversations with Jackson himself and his psychiatrist, both of whom allow Toomey to have some quasi-meta fun with the process of writing a book like the one he has written. The book indeed seems loosely built and rattles a bit structurally, as if the author hadn’t quite settled on one version of his tale. But don’t quit before the closing pages, a third-person account written by the murderer in response to Vaughan’s demands about six hours missing from his first testimony.
Toomey is aiming to do more than solve a mystery and achieves a psychologically intriguing, unnerving character study.Pub Date: March 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62897-171-2
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
