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CHILDREN OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT

A disturbingly prophetic vision of a contaminated near-future from the British writer whose dense and demanding fiction include Accident (1966) and the Whitbread Award-winning Hopeful Monsters (1991). It begins when Harry, a veteran journalist who has specialized in stories about catastrophes, travels from London to Cumbria (site of a nuclear power station) in northern England to write about the reported appearance of the Blessed Virgin to a group of children who seem to have formed a kind of adult-free commune. He suspects a red herring meant to deflect public attention from a nuclear accident, and finds what may be evidence of scientific experiments involving children. The story of Harry's own failing relationships with his suspicious wife and distracted young son adds a further dimension of uncertainty, as does Mosley's oddly—and often quite effectively—muted style, filled with rhetorical questions and abrupt changes of pace and emphasis. As Harry gradually elicits information from taciturn townspeople and the mysterious children themselves, he begins to doubt his very ability to absorb and process information. During a previous assignment, in Yugoslavia, he had, after being told of a similar religious vision, uncovered evidence of environmental contamination. Is the memory of that experience coloring his perception now? Or, perhaps more to the point, have the Cumbrian children's perceptions been altered by their exposure to radioactive particles? Unanswerable questions keep multiplying, in a complex, challenging narrative that thrusts Harry back and forth between past and present, his responsibilities as husband and father and his professional obligation to learn and tell the truth. A succession of biblical allusions (to the Cities of the Plain, Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah) and to Hieronymus Bosch's great painting The Garden of Earthly Delights are crucial building-blocks in this enigmatic novel's despairing revelations. Reminiscent of Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, and a highly interesting addition to Mosley's somber studies of contemporary moral failure and looming future shock.

Pub Date: July 15, 1997

ISBN: 1-56478-151-8

Page Count: 241

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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OF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define.  Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

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