Not exactly a tale of redemption, and in fact the pervasive bleakness and chilling details of the hunt flatten the...
Australian Leigh’s capable, disquieting debut is an homage of sorts to Moby Dick as an accomplished killer coolly stalks his prey—a Tasmanian tiger that’s the last of its breed—but is rattled when long-dormant emotions are stirred by a fractured family he encounters.
Arriving incognito at the edge of the Tasmanian bush to begin his hunt, the cold fish known as “M” immediately encounters a distraction from his mission. Two unrestrained children, a girl and her younger brother, are the welcoming committee in the house where he’s to stay between forays into the wilderness, their mother in a drugged stupor from mourning her scientist husband, who vanished months before in the same area where M will go. At first M has no time for the kids and tackles his assignment—to find and kill the tiger in order to retrieve genetic material and body parts for a biotech outfit—with the icy calm of a perfectionist, trapping and shooting and skinning creatures as it suits him. As time passes, however, his target remains elusive, and visits to base camp expose him further to each member of the family, with the result that he becomes more involved in their lives and aware of their needs. Called away on another mission without having bagged his cat, M returns after some weeks to finish the job, actually anticipating his reunion with the family. But he finds only an empty house and a trail of tragedy. Hopes of human intimacy, flawed though it might have been, now dashed, he resumes his cold-blooded ways in competition with park rangers who are also in search of the tiger, until the moment he has so long awaited arrives.
Not exactly a tale of redemption, and in fact the pervasive bleakness and chilling details of the hunt flatten the dimensions of the story somewhat, but within its obsessive vision there is power, raw and formidable. A writer to watch.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56858-169-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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