Cook has smarts and observational talent to spare, but this novel needs characters nuanced enough to justify its length.
A hip, hard-luck Londoner hops aboard a train and ponders how his life derailed.
Cook’s bulky, witty, but often maddening first novel opens with some high drama: It’s Christmas Eve 1999, and the titular hero is very drunk and boarding a train heading to northern England, determined to kill himself once he reaches his destination. But that moment of reckoning is a long way coming: As the train moves forward, his mind casts back across his previous three decades on Earth to excavate the source of his self-hatred. Some of it has to do with his stepfather, who was an abusive horror to Byron and his mother (the depth of that is withheld till the tail-end of the book), his go-nowhere job in a music shop and a flagging nascent career as a poet. In his best moments, Cook describes these personal catastrophes with ready access to the wit and lovelorn-hipster tone that marks Nick Hornby’s books, paired with Irvine Welsh’s street-wise black humor. The novel’s biggest problem, though, is Byron’s biggest problem: Mandy, the woman with whom he’s just ended a disastrous three-year marriage. She enters the book as the leader of an up-and-coming rock band. But her character eventually becomes a one-note harridan prone to violent rages that leave Byron bruised both emotionally and physically. Cook is wise to have his hero explore the intersection of abuses past and present, but Mandy is so simplistically hair-trigger that Byron’s insights tend to read more like a litany of misogynistic complaints. It’s easy to keep rooting for Byron by the time he reaches his destination, but it’s been an exhausting, repetitive journey.
Cook has smarts and observational talent to spare, but this novel needs characters nuanced enough to justify its length.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-491-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© 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.
