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JAGO

Name: JAGO
Author: Kim Newman
ISBN: 0-88184-868-9

by Kim Newman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 1993

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Once again, Newman (The Night Mayor, 1990; Bad Dreams, 1991)- -in his best effort yet—strives to deepen the horror-novel genre, or give it new levels. Here, Newman builds upon the main device of Bad Dreams, in which dreams mushroomed into dreams within dreams. Like Yggdrasis, the World Tree of Eddic myth ruling The Night Mayor, and Mr. Skinner, the uncontainably passionate vampire ruler of Bad Dreams, the author's new villain swells larger than life even as it's known in fantasy novels. Jago, or ``Beloved,'' is both an unnameable or untraceable bolt of divine love in human form—who now rules a portion of the English countryside and attracts a huge Woodstock festival of millions to his love kingdom (he bleeds from stigmata; a taste of his blood brings bliss; his mere presence ravishes with sexual joy all who come near him)—and a Boschian nightmare who transfuses parts of the animal and vegetable kingdoms into each other. One farmer, on whose heat-wave-crisped land the festival blooms riotously, becomes The Green Man, the very spirit of the earth—a human bush bursting with dirt and green bulbs, his roots threading the bodies of his family members as he spreads over the entrance to Jago's temple, Agapemone. A woman's arm ends handless in a pistol—just as Bosch's human scissors runs about his hellgarden. Dreams are real and shared by others. The hero, writing a thesis on end-of-the-world millenarianism, cuts his shin against one of the ravaging metal monsters from Mars in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Meanwhile, the plot, less spinal than cumulative, builds into the coming of Heaven on Earth where troubles melt like lemon drops way above the chimney tops and the corn is as high as an elephant's eye. A shot at the transcendental, with fantasy to splurge.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1993

ISBN: 0-88184-868-9

Page Count: 536

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
AN ENGLISH GHOST STORY
by Kim Newman

- BOOK REVIEW
JUDGMENT OF TEARS
by Kim Newman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BLOODY RED BARON
by Kim Newman

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THE HELP

by Kathryn Stockett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2009

This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won’t hurt its appeal and probably spells...

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The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in Mississippi-native Stockett’s ambitious first novel.

Still unmarried, to her mother’s dismay, recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with her friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth’s seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she’s been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen, mourning her son’s recent death and devoted to Elizabeth’s neglected young daughter, is careful what she shares. Aibileen’s good friend Minnie, who works for Hilly’s increasingly senile mother, is less adept at playing the subservient game than Aibileen. When Hilly, an aggressively racist social climber, fires and then blackballs her for speaking too freely, Minnie’s audacious act of vengeance almost destroys her livelihood. Unlike oblivious Elizabeth and vicious Hilly, Skeeter is at the verge of enlightenment. Encouraged by a New York editor, she decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen’s help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town’s social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter’s dangerous naïveté. Skeeter’s narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie’s heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.

This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won’t hurt its appeal and probably spells big success.

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-399-15534-5

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.