An honorable failure: heartfelt, unflinching, and oddly compelling. But this author has done, and will again do, much better.
The universal fears crystallized by 9/11 provide the initially gripping, ultimately limiting core material of this overheated tenth novel from the Booker-winning British author best known for her Regeneration Trilogy.
Very capably written and insistently readable, it’s an eventful narrative focused initially on sculptress Kate Frobisher, whose photojournalist husband Ben had moved on from covering the destroyed Twin Towers to Afghanistan, where he was killed by a sniper. Kate’s story soon meshes with that of Stephen Sharkey, whose own experience of 9/11 coincided with the discovery of his wife’s adultery. After divorcing her, Stephen moves in with his physician brother Robert’s family in rural northern England, not far from Kate’s home—and begins a book on the phenomenon of violence and our responses to it. Barker skillfully connects these protagonists and the acquaintances of each. Stephen falls for 19-year-old Justine Brathwaite, a vicar’s daughter employed as an au pair caring for Robert Sharkey’s autistic ten-year-old son Adam. And Kate, who’s temporarily disabled following a car crash, continues work on a huge statue of Christ commissioned for a cathedral—with the hired assistance of Peter Wingrave, a menacing loner (and hopeful fiction writer) with a violent past, who is Justine’s former boyfriend. Nobody heals, because Barker constructs an atmosphere so charged with real and threatened violence that her characters can scarcely breathe without screaming. Stephen attends the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague, where incriminating photographs display “Human bodies baked like dog turds in the sun.” The Sharkeys’ house is burgled, and Justine brutally injured. Robert Sharkey researches “treatments for Parkinson’s and dementia.” Barker’s characters share virtually no moments that are not claustrophobic, fearful, or death-haunted. Consequently, however vividly and powerfully their experiences strike us, they are, in the final analysis, simply not credible.
An honorable failure: heartfelt, unflinching, and oddly compelling. But this author has done, and will again do, much better.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-20905-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
