TESTIMONY OF AN IRISH SLAVE GIRL

Name: TESTIMONY OF AN IRISH SLAVE GIRL
Author: Kate McCafferty
ISBN: 0-670-03065-1

by Kate McCafferty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2002

As McCafferty’s preface declares, “The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism.” For that...

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Surefire dramatic material and a hauntingly exotic setting are the most striking features of this debut historical about an Irish girl kidnapped, sold into slavery, and later involved in a failed rebellion against the “plantocracy” that exploits black and white victims alike.

The time is the later 17th century, and she who “testifies” is middle-aged Cot Quashey (born Daley), under interrogation by Peter Coote, an “Apothecary-Doctor” also employed as an investigator by the governor of Barbados. As the priggish, thoughtlessly elitist and racist Coote prompts her impatiently, Cot relates the details of her abduction (when she was only ten years old), passage to the West Indies on an overcrowded, stinking “slaver,” and twenty-plus years at two sugar plantations, where black African and “dispensable” white slaves labored together, cutting cane and enduring forced cohabitation (“The breeding was an extra duty after a full day in the fields”). Cot’s piecemeal tale rises frequently to rhapsodic heights as she recalls the births and losses of her children, and particularly her unexpectedly happy marriage to “Quashey the Coromantee,” a black African Muslim regarded as “a man of rank among the bondsfolk” whose elaborate plan to liberate the slaves is brutally put down—yet not before Cot is implicated in the “crime,” for which she’ll never stop paying. It’s an engrossing story, bolstered by an impressive wealth of carefully researched period detail. But it all flashes by too quickly, and McCafferty’s very pointed references to Cot’s descent from a family of “seanachies” (i.e., bards) do little to dispel the reader’s growing sense that the character’s voice is an unconvincingly literate stand-in for the author’s, doling out exposition and compacted narrative as if conducting a history lesson. And, once Cot’s story reaches the events of the revolt itself, they’re presented in inexplicably abrupt summary form.

As McCafferty’s preface declares, “The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism.” For that reason alone, Testimony is well worth reading—though it’s not nearly as wonderful as it might have been.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2002

ISBN: 0-670-03065-1

Page Count: 204

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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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.