Still, in spite of false notes and some psychological thinness, Thornton does manage to bring back Conrad, his London, his...
Thornton (Tales from the Blue Archives, 1997, etc.) tries hard to re-evoke the life and times of the Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924).
Non-Conradians may feel rather left out here, so thoroughly steeped in the great author’s life and novels is Thornton’s ingeniously attempted literary tour de force. His own narrator, the Englishman Jack Malone, actually (that is, fictionally) knew Joseph Conrad over a period of years, and, with other friends, enjoyed evenings of conversation and tale-telling on the deck of the sailing boat Nellie, anchored in the Thames. Many will immediately recall Heart of Darkness, where the tale is told on that very same Nellie’s deck, spun out then, however, not by a man named Malone but by the famous Conradian narrator-character Marlowe, who “tells” the story. Like Conrad, Thornton even goes so far as to nest one narrative inside another, so that inside the tale that Malone-Marlowe tells us (he writes it in 1930, remembering back to 1924), we find Conrad in turn telling a tale to Malone-Marlowe. Conrad’s tale is the best one, about a WWI minesweeper: After sinking a German sub, the English captain heinously betrays his command, out of personal spite, and lets the German sailors drown. The tale, with its Lord Jim parallels, will be interwoven throughout Malone-Marlowe’s later narrative, but not always convincingly. Malone’s tale has largely to do with his belated discovery that Conrad had indeed turned him into a narrator and had “used,” in his novels, the stories Malone told on the Nellie. Malone’s discomfiture rings thinly at best for a reader today—what’s wrong with being made a character? And Conrad’s own discomfiture—afraid that if people learn that there was a “real” Marlowe, he’ll be accused of having “cheated” by using hand-me-down stories—brings even more incredulity.
Still, in spite of false notes and some psychological thinness, Thornton does manage to bring back Conrad, his London, his Thames, and even his dangerous but beautiful South China Sea. (N.B.: A feature film of Thornton’s 1987 debut, Imagining Argentina, is scheduled for release this September.)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6007-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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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