A nuanced study of the power plays and violence sparked by colonialism.
A cross-racial romance complicates tensions in 19th-century colonial Mozambique.
The second novel in this trilogy (following Woman of the Ashes, 2018) is set in 1895 amid territorial fighting among Portuguese colonists, the powerful native leader Ngungunyane, and the VaChopi, a rival tribe. But its heart is the affair between Imani, a young VaChopi woman, and Portuguese Sgt. Germano de Melo. As the story opens, Imani’s family is trying to ferry an injured Germano to safety, finding refuge in a church whose priest is ostensibly Catholic but who has fallen for a native healer and adapted his faith to match. (“Here, even Christ would have thrown in the towel,” he proclaims.) Couto’s narrative is designed to highlight how opposing sensibilities merge and repel each other; the novel alternates between Imani’s narration and letters from Germano and other Portuguese military leaders. Germano needs to decide whether his love for Imani is worth sacrificing his military position; meanwhile, Imani is trying to balance whether she can keep her relationship with Germano while also, at her father’s insistence, being part of a peace offering with Ngungunyane. It’s best to start with Woman of the Ashes to feel better grounded in this dynamic but also because Couto’s writing has a richer, more allegorical feel there; Imani’s voice in the first novel has a dreamlike cast, the better to capture the disorientation and fear that marks her tribe’s precarious position; here the prose is more flatly descriptive. Still, the second novel offers a helpful summary of the first and provides a stand-alone story with its own intrigues, as battles between the colonists and colonized intensify, and a late-breaking plot twist sets up the concluding novel on both symbolic and plot levels.
A nuanced study of the power plays and violence sparked by colonialism.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-25689-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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