A mixed bag: no threat to The Once and Future King, but a pleasant enough outing for fans of the hobbit and fairy-tale genre.
A talky addendum to the Arthurian cycle, set ten years after the great king’s death.
McCormack’s Dark Ages are less grittily realistic than the Dark Ages, say, of those other great miners of Arthurian legend, the assembled wits of Monty Python (“How do you know he’s a king?” “Because he hasn’t got shit all over him”). True, Monthy Python worked in a different genre—humor—but, even so, McCormack’s world comes off as a cool and didactic place where people are always informing one another of the eternal and momentary verities: “An Ealdorman is a chieftain, but a Cyning is a ruler over chieftains,” one character helpfully explains to another (the explainer is Gereint, rescued from appearing only as a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle). McCormack’s tale goes thus: After Arthur sails away to Avalon, Britain is a lawless place, beset by Saxon invaders and other pests who have, naturally enough, heard wondrous tales of a thing called the Holy Grail. It’s up to one of Arthur’s junior lieutenants, Budoc, now a hermit, to stop them from befouling Albion with their presence and from making off with any such treasures. With the aid of a few likely and unlikely companions, he does what he can toward that end. That would be all to the good if there were more swords-and-sorcery stuff, or at least a few more martial set pieces to quicken the pace. But, as it is, McCormack’s characters mostly chat among themselves, those old enough remembering the good old days, the younger ones just twittering along. The mood overall is Prince Valiant with a little booze and the occasional breast, together with the requisite oratory (“He serves all things in the Sea-girt Green Space . . . all things in the Honey Isle”), but not quite the requisite amount of blood.
A mixed bag: no threat to The Once and Future King, but a pleasant enough outing for fans of the hobbit and fairy-tale genre.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1494-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
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
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