A disappointment: McCabe's voice is a treasure, but it cannot turn water into beer.
A collection of vaguely linked stories, set in the fictional Irish town of Barntrosna and putatively authored by one Phildy Hackball - who is, in fact, none other than Irish novelist McCabe (Breakfast on Pluto, 1998, etc.).
The tremendous success of McCabe's dark novel The Butcher Boy, and the even greater success of Neil Jordan's bleakly riotous film of it, have suddenly brought McCabe a much larger audience abroad than he now enjoys at home (although his popularity has swelled there, too). Consequently, the market for his work has increased to such a degree that sales of just about anything with his name on it are pretty well assured. This may explain how these rather slight stories - which give every impression of being either fragments or sketches of larger works left stillborn - found their way into print, for there is nothing very memorable or striking in any of them, or in the collection as a whole. There is McCabe's distinctive voice, to be sure - simultaneously quaint and outrageous, capable of offending the very people it most entertains - and this is no small thing. The obsessed bishop of "I Ordained the Devil" (who comes to the conclusion, in the most macabre Jamesian style, that he did precisely that), the demented jealous husband of "Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge" (who's so convinced that his wife is unfaithful to him that he loses his reason in an Othellian fit of jealousy), and the epicene, pious prig of "the Bursted Priest" (who drives his young classmates so mad with his piety that they enact upon him a vengeance worthy of the Spanish Inquisition) - all of these (and quite a few others) are true McCabian types who lack the benefit of a real McCabian plot. Like bastard children, they have their father's eyes but lack his fortunes, and seem quite forlorn and homeless in the end.
A disappointment: McCabe's voice is a treasure, but it cannot turn water into beer.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019461-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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