Wray is the real thing, and Canaan’s Tongue is itself a masterpiece.
A plot to resell escaped slaves and the wisdom of the kabala are ingeniously linked, in Whiting Award winner Wray’s ambitious successor to his superb debut (The Right Hand of Sleep, 2001).
Its shaping actions predate the Civil War, as self-proclaimed “redeemer” Thaddeus Morelle (a dwarf swollen with gigantic ambitions) assembles several criminal companions as “the Island 37 Gang” (so named for their hideaway, moribund Geburah Plantation in Mississippi, located in a neverland between Union and Confederate jurisdictions). The Gang includes a stuttering assassin (Kennedy), an introverted “intriguer” (Parson), “molly-coddled” demi-aristocrat Asa Twist (“madman and heir to this estate”), handsome half-caste Oliver Delamare (entrusted with luring “fellow” blacks to their doom) and major protagonist Virgil Ball: half-Jewish, cursed with a sightless “dead eye” (in which Morelle sees prophetic potential), and a flawed sensibility that makes him equally vulnerable to Morelle’s serpentine charisma and his own hunger for wealth and security. Their story is an increasingly horrific one, of ironic accommodation to the momentum of history (since “Abolitionizing” threatens their “Trade,” they yearn for war), internecine struggles and accumulating betrayals, the kidnapping and detention of the forthright whore (Clementine Gilchrist) with whom Virgil hopes to build a respectable life, and a chain of savage murders that reveals a cunning pattern—a realization of their perverse Redeemer’s quest to ascend the “ladder of the spirit” as one of “the Elect” (who speak a language known as “Canaan’s tongue”). But the author of this plot is, in several senses, not the man he seems. Wray relates these fiery materials in a stunning narrative composed of multiple voices: an epic of violence and greed and inescapable judgment that somewhat resembles—and arguably surpasses in richness and power—Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Wray is the real thing, and Canaan’s Tongue is itself a masterpiece.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4086-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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