Memorable people in an equally memorable setting, but their fates seem determined more by plot than passion.
From a Sri Lankan–born writer now living in California, a cool-blooded first novel, an emotionally cool debut luminously detailing the course of unlikely loves and friendships on a tea plantation in the days before independence.
In this stately narrative, thoughts and feelings are sensitively reported, and characters, with rare exceptions, behave decently. The story therefore often seems more a portrait of colonial life than a searing tale of crossed lovers and doomed friendships. When Lizzie Buckwater is born on Chandi's fourth birthday in the early 1930s, the two seem unlikely to become best friends. On the Glencairn tea plantation managed by Lizzie’s English father, Chandi lives next to the kitchen with his mother, Premawathi (the housekeeper), and his two elder sisters, Leela and Rangi. John Buckwater and his family inhabit the spacious rooms of the plantation’s bungalow. Chandi, who dreams of living in England, secretly starts saving the money he makes selling flowers to passersby. When Lizzie's mother Elsie, tired of living in Sri Lanka, returns to England, Chandi and Lizzie are soon inseparable, freely roaming the estate. As the years pass, Premawathi falls out of love with her husband, who has been working in the capital, and one night she and John, a tolerant and decent man, become lovers. Chandi worries about his mother's relationship with John, fears the vengeance of Krishna, a former servant who’s been fired for lewd behavior, and feels responsible for his sister Rangi's suicide. Then in a brief interlude of tranquility, Premawathi accepts her feelings for John, daughter Leela makes a good marriage, and Chandi, still Lizzie's best friend, develops into a bright young man with prospects. But like all Edens, Glencairn's happiness is precarious, and, when Sri Lanka gains its independence, life for the English colonials turns dangerous and uncertain.
Memorable people in an equally memorable setting, but their fates seem determined more by plot than passion.Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50316-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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