A too faithful retelling that, despite some vivid moments, ultimately has little life of its own.
The Iliad in the Irish borderlands during the final months of the Troubles.
Northern Ireland, 1996. Despite the cease-fire, Shane Campbell (alias Pig), the Officer Commanding of a Provisional IRA unit, is planning a strike on a nearby British Army garrison. Why? Because Pig’s sister-in-law Nellie, the wife of his brother Brian (alias Dog), has tarnished the Campbell name by turning “tout” (Loyalist/British agent) and then running away to England with her handler. Sound familiar? Just you wait. The action opens with a disagreement between Pig and Liam O’Brien (unsubtle alias: Achill). After Pig is forced to return “his girl” to her father, a local Protestant landowner, he decides that he must have Achill’s girl as a replacement. Achill—the famed Border Sniper, hugely feared by the IRA’s enemies—rebels against Pig’s tyranny by putting down his arms, an act which emboldens the British (the best of whom is SAS Capt. Henry Morrow) to set an ambush for Pig’s team. The rest is…well…The Iliad. And that’s the problem. Writing in a fast-paced Irish lilt, debut bard Hughes is at his best (which, mind you, can be good) when he’s least faithful to his Homeric blueprint. His reimagining of Helen (here Nellie) is especially striking, showing how a young woman’s search for freedom ends up entangling her (because abortions are illegal) in the very place and conflict from which she seeks escape. But Nellie’s section is, alas, an exception. Hughes is faithful to Homer’s story at the expense of his own. His characters are not themselves but proxies for the Homeric originals; they don the armor and read the lines but are lacking in on-the-page emotional complexity. Similarly, dozens of scenes are included to simply check off their corresponding plot box in The Iliad—and therefore deliver very little affect of their own. The result? The novel, despite its promising start, quickly devolves into a litany of allusions. Look! The Republican pub is called the Ships! Look! The British fort is called Castle William but some kids monkeyed with the sign and now it reads “Castle Illiam!” Look! Pat (nee Patroclus) is literally wearing Achill’s body armor! Look! Achill, the famed long-distance sniper, has literally chased Henry three times around Illiam’s walls on foot!
A too faithful retelling that, despite some vivid moments, ultimately has little life of its own.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-294032-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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