Another unusual and original novel from Down Under.
This lively and increasingly engrossing second novel from the Australian author of The Salt of Broken Tears (2001) reinvents Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the story of a traveling vaudeville troupe’s impact on a remote northwestern backwater.
The action occurs on a single day in 1955, when the Blind Concert (a real-life group whose performances raised funds for blind people) pulls into the “one-horse town” of Towaninnie—led by an ostentatious Pontiac carrying aging “star” Leonard Barrington and his unhappy wife, a former concert soprano now very much out of her element. The opening chapters swiftly, skillfully introduce major characters, most of them are specific counterpart-echoes of Shakespeare’s originals. For instance, English-born flautist Amanda Jones, the troupe’s saxophone soloist and a suggestible maiden in search of True Love, is ingénue Miranda; the Barringtons’ scapegrace son Freddie, fleeing his gambling debts, will become the romantic hero redeemed by love; and the elderly “compere” who directs the performance, “his nose always stuck in his stupid books” as he contemplates retirement and the completion of his memoirs, is Meehan’s Prospero. The story’s most interesting figure is its Caliban: “the rabbiter,” a muscular, malicious orphaned recluse who lives in a festering swamp with his “beastly” dog Spot, amuses himself by playing outrageous pranks on the Towaninnians who loathe and fear him, and is himself transformed and exalted by the “magic” that’s displayed in the book’s lavish extended climax: a triumphant evening performance, following a day of unceasing rain—when “for a sacred moment world and stage were bound in feeling, and against all things of darkness.” It’s all more than a bit stagey, and the Shakespearean echoes sometimes feel forced. Nevertheless, Meehan’s constructive skill and empathy with his vivid characters’ makeshift vagrant lives make it all work surprisingly well.
Another unusual and original novel from Down Under.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-620-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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