Carey has written several fine contemporary novels, but his genius always seems especially invigorated by an encounter with...
Booker Prize–winner Carey (Jack Maggs, 1998, etc.) assumes the voice of 19th-century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.
The story opens with an account of the Kelly gang’s capture by police on June 28, 1880, so we know this tale will end badly for the most famous of the “bushrangers,” who expressed the rage felt by many poor Australians, especially those who were, like Kelly, descended from Irish convicts, against English political and economic oppression. Ned’s first-person narrative is addressed to the daughter he’s never seen (her pregnant mother fled to America rather than witness his inevitable death) in run-on prose that faultlessly reproduces the speech rhythms of the uneducated without becoming distracting. Describing his youth, Kelly claims the early charges against him were largely fabricated by vengeful police with a grudge against his mother’s family. Her son adores Ellen Quinn Kelly, never judging her for the men she takes up with after his father abandons her (though he hates them all), or even for apprenticing him to bushranger Harry Power when he’s only 15. Landing in jail shortly thereafter, Ned writes, “I knew I were finally in that place ordained from the moment of my birth.” We quickly learn that the basically good-hearted Ned is a mediocre criminal and poor judge of character: his gang includes reckless younger brother Dan; Steve Hart, intoxicated by the self-destructive legends of Irish rebellion; and opium-addicted Joe Byrne, whose pipe companion betrays them to the police. Though their first robbery nets enough money to get them all safely to America, Ned suicidally refuses to leave. Our naive hero thinks he can get his mother out of jail by addressing long, self-justifying letters to the authorities. Not a chance, of course, but there’s a rough, poetic grandeur to Ned’s belief that “we had showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born.”
Carey has written several fine contemporary novels, but his genius always seems especially invigorated by an encounter with the past, as in this sorrowful, bleakly beautiful meditation on his native Australia’s poisoned history.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41084-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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