Engaging, pleasantly written, and endlessly inventive: all promising signs and a reader’s delight.
If Watership Down were to meet the Flashman novels—well, the result still wouldn’t be quite like this perky debut, not until you threw in a little Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, maybe.
Rabbits don’t live overly long. William, a white rabbit—cue Jefferson Airplane on the soundtrack if you will and must—is 11, a ripeness that “obliges me to press on with my storytelling.” William is a winsome character, his granny, Old Lavender, a little less tender but always good for a morsel of wisdom: “The most interesting things in life cannot be seen, William,” she intones, which is perhaps why lagomorphs—not rodents, mind you—are so committed to digging deep down into the earth. In debut novelist Francombe’s charming confection, William determines that the burrow in which he lives was once part of the Belgian battlefield on which Napoleon and Wellington slugged it out for the last time, which means that plenty of ancestral rabbits must have been blown to bits two centuries ago but also that the survivors “had not been too traumatized to procreate.” Chasing down the reverberations of that history through modern rabbitdom, Francombe would seem to be serving up an allegory, and though what she’s allegorizing isn’t exactly clear—war, memory, the importance of family, and maybe even rabbit-free cuisine are all thematic candidates—she never lets on that this coney island of the mind isn’t an impossibility. Nicely developed, too, is her sense of how rabbits think of time: there isn’t a lot of it in their world, but that doesn’t mean that one needs to scamper about mindlessly, for, to quote William by way of Old Lavender once more, “to do something important at the wrong moment is worse than not doing it at all.” You’d look high and low, too, for a better description of how rabbits actually are—twitchy and pensive but also content to spend their days “eyes half shut, contemplating the infinite.”
Engaging, pleasantly written, and endlessly inventive: all promising signs and a reader’s delight.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24691-9
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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