NUMBER 11

Name: NUMBER 11
Author: Jonathan Coe
ISBN: 978-0-451-49336-1

by Jonathan Coe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2017

This powerful and enthralling novel takes the measure of a society feeding on its members as little contemporary fiction has.

bookshelf

The political and cultural state of contemporary Britain is dissected in this multistrand novel.

Coe's book is a sequel to The Winshaw Legacy (1995), a deadly serious satirical tale in which Thatcherism paid for its crimes through the merciless and meticulous dispatch of a family of right-wing upper-class monsters. Revenge is meted out here as well, in a much more fantastical way. The anchors of the story are two women, friends, whom we follow from girlhood, where they meet at a private school, to adulthood, where their lives have diverged. Rachel, who goes on to become the nanny to a horrendous upper-class family which embodies the greed of the new gilded age, is as a child obsessed with the suicide of U.N. weapons inspector David Kelly near the beginning of the Iraq War. Rachel's friend Alison watches her once briefly famous mother humiliate herself to get back into the spotlight. The misunderstanding that separates the two for many years can be read as a pithy comment on how we now accept the alienation technology has brought into our lives. The other strands of the story—involving a faded pop star, an academic whose dead husband was obsessed with tracking down an obscure German film, and the surviving tentacles of the Winshaw clan—add up to a picture of the U.K. from the time Tony Blair pulled the country into the Iraq War to the present day and its legacy from Thatcher: the rich in a state of permanent ascendancy and the social contract shredded by engineered ruthlessness which leaves Britons in a continual state of want or, in the case of those who can't afford live-saving medicine, dead. The tone is not so much anger as a state of settled disgust at the death of shame. Sections on the squalor of reality TV and the mob mentality the internet has brought about are particularly lethal. The denouement plays like Creature Feature by way of the Old Testament.

This powerful and enthralling novel takes the measure of a society feeding on its members as little contemporary fiction has.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-451-49336-1

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BOURNVILLE
by Jonathan Coe

- BOOK REVIEW
MR. WILDER AND ME
by Jonathan Coe

- BOOK REVIEW
MIDDLE ENGLAND
by Jonathan Coe

bookshelf

THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THERE WAS A COUNTRY
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
HOME AND EXILE
by Chinua Achebe

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.