Tasty but filling: a rich (too rich, perhaps) portrait of a time and a place that have received less than their fair share...
The first of a two-volume portrait of 1970s England, focused here by the prizewinning Coe (The House of Sleep, 1998, etc.) on a circle of four Birmingham schoolmates.
Perhaps it is a delusion to suppose that we write our own histories. The author seems to suggest so by unfolding his narrative from the perspective of the children of two of the protagonists, who meet in Berlin, in 2003, and reminisce about their parents, who were young so long ago, in “a world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes.” The friends—Phillip, Benjamin, Harding, and Douglas—met at King William’s, a “fucking toff’s academy” in Birmingham, during the dreary decade that brought bad clothes, racial guilt, and good stereo systems to the farthest corners of the Queen’s realm. The early 1970s were dominated by labor strife, the unions taking a final bow and bringing down governments and paralyzing life for everyone with their strikes. Not all of the boys at King William’s are preppie brats, however—Douglas’s father Bill Anderton works at the troubled British Leyland factory—and even their fustiest schoolmasters support the Labour Party. The most reactionary elements in Birmingham, in fact, are to be found farther down the social scale, in those like shop steward Roy Slater (Bill Anderton’s nemesis) and his racist friends from the National Front. Much of the historical background—the wedding of Princess Anne, for example, or the political fall of Enoch Powell—may be unfamiliar to Americans, but the story’s basic outlines (young people discovering the world and following the course of their lives) are amiable and clear. Eventually, the focus becomes the shy Benjamin and his hopeless love for Cicely. There’s a happy ending of sorts, but plenty of questions wait for Part II.
Tasty but filling: a rich (too rich, perhaps) portrait of a time and a place that have received less than their fair share of literary attention.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41383-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Plaudits for the concept of a woman pursuing and getting her intellectual equal, but, here, gabby and relentlessly high-minded lovers turn Rush's first novel (after the story collection, Whites, 1986) into a meeting of true minds with too long an agenda. When a 30-ish unnamed American woman discovers that her anthropological thesis, which she had come to research in Botswana, is invalid, she decides to be ``hedonic, think passim about my life and next steps'' and ``repose in the white utopia Gaborone was.'' Which she does until she meets the legendary Nelson Denoon, guru of rural development, preacher of a third way for African countries, and rumored to be in charge of a distant village, Tsau, run by and for women. Intrigued by his brilliance and reputation, the woman sets off alone across the Botswana desert, nearly dying in the attempt but finally reaching Tsau. The village is the vehicle for Denoon's ideas about women (``Every female is a golden loom''), religion (religious buildings are banned in Tsau), education, solar power, and just about everything else. The love affair— exhaustively annotated and dissected all in the first person—is inevitable, and though they make agreeable love and though Denoon is all that he should be, it is the talk that matters—''I love your mind,'' she proclaims. They talk up a storm on everything from the ANC in South Africa to the anarchosyndicalists of Spain. But Tsau is not quite paradise—serpents exist, and Denoon himself changes after an accident in the desert, where he may have undergone a religious experience. Our heroine, disenchanted, returns to the US, but a mysterious message from Africa provokes her curiosity—she might venture another investigation of this most unusual man. In essence a love story, an unusual and credible one, with an exotic locale, and a colorful supporting cast; but the nonstop clever talk eventually provokes irritation rather than sympathy. A flawed novel of too many ideas, many good, but collectively too much.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-54472-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A simply told, warm, rather melancholy tale of changing times in the small ranch country of Texas. On old-time cowboy Grandad's ranch, old and new generations are uneasily mixed. Second wife Grandma complains and listens to the radio; her vicious son is obsessed with town, care and women. Lonnie, his grandson by the first marriage, likes Grandad, the land, life and its people, but is restless and lonely and ambiguously drawn to the easy-going Negro women, Helmea, who is the real mother of the household. Many tensions erupt and when Helmea is raped by one of the men (a terrible, pitiful scene), she leaves and the household collapses. The cattle, infected, are shot and buried by bulldozers and the old man, too, dies inside. Lonnie, at loose ends, goes off to the rodeo and returns to find Grandad in a ditch, terribly injured, later to be shot in a "mercy killing". Lonnie, finding that the old way of life is lost, sets out to drift... The isolation and the homely, tangible beauty of small ranch life removes the taint of melodrama from this tale. The people (especially Nelmas), the country, the cattle are real. Grandad's way of life is strong-and can only be killed violently - so that it is a fitting end that he meets.
Pub Date: June 15, 1961
ISBN: 068485385X
Page Count: 196
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1961
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