Sharply observed, bitingly witty yet emotionally generous, and as ominous as the times deserve.
Benjamin Trotter, friends, and family return (The Closed Circle, 2005, etc.) to observe, mostly with dismay, the run-up to Brexit in a divided Britain.
In April 2010, just after the funeral of his mother, Benjamin listens impassively for what is obviously not the first time as his father, Colin, rails about “political correctness” ruining everything once great about Britain. Ugly though usually veiled comments by others make it clear that those words are used to denigrate anything that acknowledges England is no longer an all-white, all-Christian nation; immigrants and people of color make easy scapegoats in the anxious years after the economic meltdown. As the narrative moves toward the Brexit vote in 2016, Coe, with his usual acuity, tells the story of a collective meltdown through its impact on individuals. Benjamin’s journalist friend, Doug, spars with vacuous Tory flak Nigel as David Cameron’s government blunders toward the referendum it thinks it can manipulate to its own ends. Benjamin’s niece, Sophie, an art historian, finds her new marriage to sweet, totally unintellectual Ian strained when the promotion he’d counted on goes to a nonwhite colleague and he starts listening to his genteelly racist mother, Helena. Helena is hardly worse than Doug’s daughter, Coriander, a nihilistic teen who incarnates every cliché about sanctimonious ultra-leftists. Coe’s marvelous humor is still in evidence, but it’s got a decided edge: There's a cruise on which elderly passengers keep dying, inept middle-aged sex, and a bemused friend’s suggestion, when confronted with Benjamin’s decades-in-the-making mess of a novel, “Have you ever thought of taking up teaching?” Actually, a very slimmed-down version gets Benjamin longlisted for the Booker Prize, one of the semioptimistic touches (he loses) that include Nigel’s experiencing something almost like an attack of honesty post-Brexit and Benjamin’s sister Lois’ finally overcoming her PTSD from a 1974 Irish Republican Army bombing—because things are so much worse now. Coe’s empathy for even the most flawed people and a bedrock, albeit eroding, faith in human decency keep his text from being bitter, but it is deeply sad.
Sharply observed, bitingly witty yet emotionally generous, and as ominous as the times deserve.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65647-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.
A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet.
Eight years after Obreht’s sensational debut, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), she returns with a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin. She keeps her penchant for animals and the dead but switches up centuries and continents. Having won an Orange Prize for The Tiger’s Wife, a mesmerizing 20th-century Balkan folktale, Obreht cuts her new story from a mythmaking swatch of the Arizona Territory in 1893. The book alternates between the narratives of two complex, beset protagonists: Lurie, an orphan and outcast who killed a boy, and Nora, a prickly frontierswoman with her own guilty conscience. Both speak to the dead. Lurie sees ghosts from early childhood and acquires their “wants,” while Nora keeps up a running conversation with her daughter, Evelyn, dead of heatstroke as a baby but aging into a fine young woman in her mother’s mind. Obreht throws readers into the swift river of her imagination—it takes a while to realize that Lurie is addressing all his remarks to a camel. The land is gripped by terrible drought. As Nora’s homestead desiccates, her husband leaves in search of water, and her older sons bolt after an explosive dispute. An indignant local drunk wonders whether “anybody else in this town [had] read an almanac or history in their lives? What were they all doing here, watching the sky, farming rock and dust?” Still, a deep stoicism, flinty humor, and awe at the natural world pervade these characters. They are both treacherous and good company. Here is Nora, hyperaware of a man who’s not her husband: “Foremost on her mind: the flimsiness of her unlaundered shirt and the weight of her boots.” Lurie, hiding among the U.S. Army’s camel cavaliers (you can look them up), is dogged down the years by Arkansas Marshal John Berger. Their encounters mystify both men. Meanwhile, there are head lice, marvelous, dueling newspaper editorials, and a mute granny with her part to play.
The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9286-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Collins invokes both Voltaire and Defoe here, and she forges an unlikely but sadly harmonic connection with both these...
There’s betrayal, depravity, pseudoscience, forbidden love, drug addiction, white supremacy, and, oh yes, a murder mystery with tightly wound knots to unravel.
The citizenry of 1826 London has worked itself into near apoplexy over the sensational trial of “The Mulatta Murderess,” aka Frances Langton, a Jamaican servant accused of brutally stabbing her white employers to death. Though caught on the night of the murders covered with blood, Frances cannot remember what happened and thus cannot say whether or not she is guilty. “For God’s sake, give me something I can save your neck with,” her lawyer pleads. And so Frannie, who, despite having been born into slavery, became adept at reading and writing, tries to find her own way to the truth the only way she can: By writing her life’s story from its beginnings on a West Indian plantation called Paradise whose master, John Langton, is a vicious sadist. He uses Frannie for sex and as a “scribe” taking notes on his hideous experiments into racial difference using skulls, blood, and even skin samples. After a fire destroys much of his plantation, Langton takes Frannie to London and makes her a gift to George Benham, an urbane scientist engaged in the same dubious race-science inquiries. Frannie’s hurt over her abandonment is soon dispelled by her fascination with Benham’s French-born wife, Marguerite, a captivating beauty whose lively wit and literary erudition barely conceal despondency that finds relief in bottles of laudanum. A bond forms between mistress and servant that swells and tightens into love, leading to a tempest of misunderstanding, deceit, jealousy, and, ultimately, death. Collins’ debut novel administers a bold and vibrant jolt to both the gothic and historical fiction genres, embracing racial and sexual subtexts that couldn’t or wouldn’t have been imagined by its long-ago practitioners. Her evocations of early-19th-century London and antebellum Jamaica are vivid and, at times, sensuously graphic. Most of all, she has created in her title character a complex, melancholy, and trenchantly observant protagonist; too conflicted in motivation, perhaps, to be considered a heroine but as dynamic and compelling as any character conceived by a Brontë sister.
Collins invokes both Voltaire and Defoe here, and she forges an unlikely but sadly harmonic connection with both these enlightenment heroes in her gripping, groundbreaking debut.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285189-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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