A journey through Purgatory takes amusing, appropriately elusive form in this mordant second novel by the English author of The Restraint of Beasts (1998). Mills’s suggestive title alludes both to its (nameless) narrator’s unfulfilled hope of journeying overland through Europe to India, and to Erich Maria Remarque’s classic fictional account of the wholesale slaughter of an entire continent’s young manhood. The story—told in a flat, affectless voice perfectly suited to its rural milieu—begins when its protagonist, “on holiday” at a lakeside campsite, accepts temporary work as a handyman for the phlegmatic Mr. Parker. All the narrator knows is that “Tommy” Parker is “into buying and selling”—farm machinery and oil drums—and is known locally, especially at the pubs the narrator visits nightly, for his terrible temper. One task after another (painting a fence, rowing boats broken loose from their moorings across a lake, taking over a milk run), accepted in lieu of paying rent, binds the narrator more firmly to the place he keeps planning to leave. Before realizing how acclimated he’s become, he’s an essential member of his favorite pub’s darts team, and the compliant drudge who does homework for Mr. Parker’s teenaged daughter. A hard rain on the day of his planned departure stalls his motorcycle—and Mr. Parker’s firm hold on him grows stronger. Warned that he must finish all the tasks assigned him “before Christmas,” the narrator gradually understands that, like the unidentified “one who was here before you,” his is not to reason why, but to work as ordered, then pass on to whatever lies ahead (some very pronounced images of descent and conflagration judiciously scattered throughout the closing pages, pretty clearly indicate where he’s going). Both Pilgrim’s Progress and the nearly forgotten allegorical novels of T.F. Powys (e.g., Mr. Weston’s Good Wine) come to mind. Still, this is an original and haunting creation: a vision of Judgment whose very opacity gives it impressive symmetry, comedy, and power.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-495-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
