Still, this is a fast-paced, hard-nosed fable about revenge, pursuit, and the search for a moral compass in a place where...
The second novel from Australian writer Wilson, whose debut (The Roving Party, 2014) won literary prizes and comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, offers another stylish—if familiar—contribution to the literature of lyric violence.
Tasmania in 1874 is a combination of bedlam and Hieronymus Bosch, peopled with sots, convicts, derelicts, opportunists, and hard cases of every kind. The town of Launceston is a remote and lawless outpost of this remote and lawless outpost. At the novel's beginning, a middle-aged mother in the town dies, leaving her 12-year-old son to the tender unmercies of the local constabulary and a "charitable" man named Stewart who exposes himself to hungry children as the price of his generosity. The boy dispatches a letter to his father, Thomas Toosey, a reformed drunk who was convicted of infanticide and sent off years earlier. The elder Toosey, a ruffian among ruffians, embarks on a desperate journey to save his son. He is pursued at every step by a vengeance-bent Irishman named Fitheal Flynn and Flynn's silent, mysterious hooded companion, who goes by the name of the legendary hangman Ketch. As Toosey arrives in Launceston after years of exile, with Flynn and Ketch close behind, a brutal street riot breaks out over an unjust railroad levy, and violence begets violence begets violence. In thinking of American analogues, one is reminded less of McCarthy and more of writers like Tom Franklin and Donald Ray Pollock, but the book lacks the dark, ribald humor of Pollock and the interest in tangled racial history behind a novel like Franklin's Hell at the Breech.
Still, this is a fast-paced, hard-nosed fable about revenge, pursuit, and the search for a moral compass in a place where chaos and rage and injustice set every dial wildly aquiver.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-349-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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