A flawed gem.
A young British-Indian woman faces a moral crisis while filming a BBC documentary, in Lalwani’s follow-up to Gifted (2007).
Ray, 27, has received a plum assignment for a relative rookie: She will direct a television documentary about a noble experiment in Indian corrections—Ashwer, a prison camp in the form of a small village where the convicts live with their families and work for a living, either at day jobs on the outside or in cottage industries of their own devising. Ray’s crew—Serena, a seasoned producer, and Nathan, a parolee who did time in a conventional English prison—are difficult to manage: They have their own ideas about the direction of the film, although they grudgingly depend on Ray, a Hindi speaker, to act as interpreter and mediator for the villagers. All of the people sentenced to Ashwer are murderers whose crimes were committed under extenuating circumstances, such as self-defense against spouse abuse. After a marijuana-fueled late-night seduction attempt foiled largely by Ray’s determined virginity, Nathan gives up on her and turns to Serena. Their alliance thus strengthened, the crew rebels against Ray’s ethical scruples and attempts (with some prompting from the home office) to inject sensational elements into the film. They insist on arranging and filming an encounter between an inmate, Nandini, and her ex-husband, who had starved her while pregnant and tried to burn her. (She killed his mother while trying to escape.) Then there is the segment in which another inmate, in front of his wife, is given an instant-read HIV test on camera. Fearing that she has betrayed the trust that she has built up with the villagers, Ray must make a painful choice. The language, gorgeous and evocative, occasionally waxes florid, as overheated as the tropical atmosphere it describes. Extraneous detail about the technical aspects of TV production slows the action. And Ray, a passive character who acts impulsively if at all, lacks the courage of the author’s convictions.
A flawed gem.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6649-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
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
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