Perturbed by reports that sperm counts among British males have been steadily dwindling in recent years, the doyenne of the English detective story has interrupted her increasingly leisurely series of mystery novels (Devices and Desires, 1989, etc.) for a futuristic dystopia of sterility. Sometime in 1995—records the divorced, bereaved, ineffectual historian/ diarist Theodore Faron—the worldwide sperm count reached zero with the birth of one Joseph Ricardo, last of the Omega generation. Now, in 2021, graying England is frozen in a lifeless nightmare. Theo's cousin Xan Lyppiatt, Warden of England, rules absolute, attended by his Grenadiers and the State Security Police. Xan has consolidated his power by conscripting all immigrating Sojourners to manual labor at public works, encouraging mass suicides (the Quietus), whose survivors are paid a government bounty, and banishing convicted criminals to the Isle of Man, now converted into a penal colony—actions all approved by a populace so frightened of growing old, unprovisioned and uncared for, and so desperate for the warmth of the young that women routinely take to the streets wheeling prams stuffed with kittens or dolls. Approached by female student Julian on behalf of the Five Fishes, a tiny group outraged by Xan's dehumanizing regimen of fertility testing and enthusiastically assisted suicide, Theo finds himself first fruitlessly reasoning with his cousin, then suddenly pulled in by the miraculous, terrifying news of Julian's pregnancy, which she's determined to keep secret from Xan's ruling council whatever the costs to the Fishes—most of whom are clearly bound for harrowing fates—or the future of the race. Despite an opening as slow as anything in James's recent outings, the departure from her usual formula is brilliantly conceived—the note of sad mortality so powerfully sustained that James's benediction of hope is almost unbearable.
Pub Date: March 4, 1993
ISBN: 0307275434
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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