Absolutely extraordinary. Readers who thought Doyle had outdone himself with the deftly juxtaposed comedy and drama in his...
The much-loved Irish author (The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, 1996, etc.) breaks impressive new ground with this masterly portrayal of the making of an IRA terrorist – the first volume of a projected trilogy entitled The Last Roundup.
In the vigorous colloquial voice that has become Doyle’s trademark, Henry Smart (b. 1901) narrates the fractious events of his 20 years, beginning with the unlikely courtship of his teenaged mother, (the ironically named) Melody Nash, by Henry’s father and namesake, a one-legged boozer who works as a bouncer (and hired killer) for Dublin madam Dolly Oblong and unseen criminal impresario Alfie Gandon. In a lustily detailed story of want and woe that easily outdistances Angela’s Ashes, Henry Sr. is betrayed to the police, Melody lapses into premature senility, and five-year-old Henry, accompanied by younger brother Victor, becomes a resourceful “street arab.” A handsome, strapping lad who learns quickly and adapts easily to violently shifting circumstances, Henry survives and, in a way, prospers – as a member of the ragtag “Irish Citizen Army” (during the vividly described Easter Monday 1916 cataclysm), a dockworker, the precocious lover of many women (including his teacher, later his wife, the fiery nationalist he will know only as “Miss O’Shea”), and IRA gunman and murderer and a trusted protégé of Michael Collins, and – in the stunning climactic pages – his father’s avenger. Throughout, Doyle manages the virtually impossible feat of mingling Ireland’s dark and bloody early modern history with his brilliantly imagined protagonist’s own amazing story: never for a moment do we feel we’re being given a history lesson, nor does Henry’s forthright amorality relax its firm hold on us.
Absolutely extraordinary. Readers who thought Doyle had outdone himself with the deftly juxtaposed comedy and drama in his recent fiction will be amazed and delighted all over again.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88757-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1999
Intelligent, reflective, satisfying fiction from an old master.
Veteran Godwin’s latest (Grief Cottage, 2017, etc.) tracks a half-century friendship between two very different yet oddly compatible women.
The dean and dorm mistress of Lovegood College pair Feron Hood and Merry Jellicoe as roommates in 1958, hoping that sunny, outgoing Merry will be a steadying influence on Feron, who has recently lost her alcoholic mother and fled from an abusive stepfather. The girls do indeed form a lasting bond even though Merry leaves after a single semester to run the family tobacco farm when her parents are killed in a plane crash. They have both taken their first steps as writers under the guidance of Literature and Composition teacher Maud Petrie, and during their mostly long-distance relationship, Feron will be goaded to write three novels by Merry’s occasional magazine publications; she is at work on a fourth about their friendship as the book closes. The two women rarely meet in person, and Feron is bad about answering letters, but we see that they remain important in each other’s thoughts. Godwin unfolds their stories in a meditative, elliptical fashion, circling back to reveal defining moments that include tragic losses, unexpected love, and nurturing friendships. Self-contained, uncommunicative Feron seems the more withholding character, but Merry voices one of the novel’s key insights: “Everyone has secrets no one else should know” while Feron reveals essential truths about her life in her novels. Maud Petrie and Lovegood dean Susan Fox, each of whom has secrets of her own, continue as strong presences for Feron and Merry, who have been shaped by Lovegood more enduringly than they might have anticipated. Feron’s courtly Uncle Rowan and blunt Aunt Mabel, Merry’s quirky brother Ritchie, devoted manager Mr. Jack, and a suave Navy veteran with intimate links to both women are among the many nuanced characters drawn by Godwin with their human contradictions and complexities on full display. A closing letter from Dean Fox movingly reiterates the novel’s conjoined themes of continuity and change.
Intelligent, reflective, satisfying fiction from an old master.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63286-822-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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