An intriguing, timely, and terrifying portent of life after Covid-19.
A gay man questions Britain’s repressive new political regime in this satirical, speculative novel by Cacoyannis, author of Finger of an Angel(2019).
The year is 2030, and 70-year-old Englishman Anthony Pablo Rubens is about to receive an unexpected special delivery that could change the course of his life. It’s a summons informing him that he’s been selected for “Museum Service”—and he doesn’t know exactly what that entails. It turns out to be a scheme introduced by the Government Party, which came to power in the United Kingdom with a landslide victory in 2024 in the wake of a viral pandemic that “exhausted the world.” The Party offered simple and deadly solutions, inciting racial hatred and promising the abolition of a trial by jury. Museum Service, it’s revealed, involves uprooting Anthony’s life—possessions and all—and exhibiting him in a cubicle in the People’s Museum, where party members can observe him going about a daily routine. The narrative flips back half a century to show Anthony as a young man navigating London’s gay scene; one night he has a chance encounter with Joe Devin, who will later become a Government Party minister. The novel also describes Anthony’s loving relationship with his ailing partner, Malcolm, and his closeness to his sister Eunice, whose political leanings echo those of their grandfather, who fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Things become tense when Anthony’s inquisitiveness results in his being labeled a “pedant” by the government and when he learns that Eunice was similarly summoned shortly before her death.
Immediate comparison will be made with the work of George Orwell, whose work is specifically referenced: “Mr Rubens suddenly felt terribly alone, living unloved and unnoticed in a nightmare worse than 1984.” However, this is by no means an ersatz rewrite of a literary classic. Cacoyannis tells a story that feels both fresh and alarming in how it identifies and amplifies concerns of our time, as when it shows life becoming anodyne as a consequence of surveillance: “bioelectric cars whizzed past with hardly a sound, at set speeds that could not be exceeded. Cyclists only cycled in the designated lanes. Smart phones weren’t so smart any more, but threatened to be smart enough to spy.” For the author, love is the antidote to a complicit society rendered indifferent to authoritarian rule. Cacoyannis’ elegant and tenderly observant prose captures how individual lives interconnect: “Anthony’s ‘gift’ seemed to always cast life in a shadow, Malcolm’s was to inundate its mysteries with light.” In previous works, the author has painstakingly created psychologically complex casts of characters, but he doesn’t apply the same level of detail to the minor players here. This is less important, however, because in this novel, the primary focus is excavating the horrors of a society rather than the internal worlds of diverse individuals. Overall, Cacoyannis has written a thoroughly gripping novel, using the rhetoric of a real-life pandemic to fashion a chilling vision of an abnormal “new normal” to come.
An intriguing, timely, and terrifying portent of life after Covid-19.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-56-036884-5
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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