A talented writer’s bold step forward. Let’s hope Cullin isn’t finished with Sherlock Holmes.
This wistful portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in old age is a real departure from Cullin’s previous up-and-down fiction (Undersurface, 2002, etc.).
We meet the Great Detective in 1947, aged 93, retired to his Sussex farm, physically and mentally impaired, though sustained by his many memories; the “beeyard” whose cultivation expresses his lifelong “desire to be a part of the original, natural order,” and the restorative effects of royal jelly and other beneficent natural substances. Cullin’s engaging tale has three deftly interwoven strands: Holmes’s extended postwar visit to Japan, which includes a tour of destroyed Hiroshima and an investigation into his host Mr. Umeyaki’s family history; an avuncular friendship with his housekeeper Mrs. Munro’s son Roger, his devoted apprentice in the art of beekeeping; and the remembered case of “The Glass Armonica,” involving a troubled marriage, alleged communion with both the dead and the unborn, and a woman Holmes could not save—for whose fate he may in fact bear a terrible responsibility. There are missteps: Though there’s no hint of sexual misconduct, Holmes’s habit of nude bathing with handsome young Roger does raise the eyebrow; and Cullin’s generally very successful appropriation of Conan Doyle’s plummy Victorian prose accommodates occasional anachronisms and barbarisms (surely Holmes would never have misused “like” for “as,” as he does herein). But the meat of the story is Cullin’s searching characterization of this ultimate rationalist perturbed and disoriented by decades of political, social and climatic change; unmanned by his lingering survival into a world grown so complex he can no longer do what he had hitherto done to perfection: observed and made sense of things. This extra layer of realistic complexity makes Cullin’s immensely moving seventh outing one of the best of all the Holmes pastiches.
A talented writer’s bold step forward. Let’s hope Cullin isn’t finished with Sherlock Holmes.Pub Date: April 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51328-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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