Aside from some contrivance in the matter of Bone’s untimely end, this is a tale of great richness and subtlety, equally...
A lilting, gentle story—last year’s Scottish Book of the Year—of a boy’s sexual awakening into a world of music in 1962, as he falls for the young composer who’s hired him to sing.
When 14-year-old Neil is sent for the summer from Glasgow to his aunt’s house on the Scottish coast, he’s barely begun to understand himself. He stays apart from others in the town, but is drawn to Slezar’s Wark, a grand white house overlooking the sea, even before he learns that Euan Bone, an increasingly prominent Scottish composer, is ensconced there with his cellist friend Douglas. Invited to audition for Bone, Neil jumps at the chance, and his boyish voice is soon serving as daily inspiration for Bone’s new work, The Lantern Bearers. There’s mystery surrounding the friendship between Douglas and Bone, making good gossip for Neil’s aunt and her friends, but Neil discovers that he has a crush on the composer, and so is compelled to find out what he can about the two. As Bone takes him under his wing, swimming in the ocean with him and educating him about music, Neil begins to feel that his own feelings might be reciprocated—and finds he’s the source of increasing friction between Bone and Douglas. But when Neil’s voice cracks, the idyll is over: he’s cast out of the house by Douglas and forbidden to return. Thereafter he shadows Bone everywhere, and is so distraught that he even steals the Lantern Bearers score, believing it’s his work as well. He returns it, but not before its absence has precipitated a split between the men. And when Neil goes home to Glasgow, he makes an even more boneheaded move—one that will cost the life of the man he holds most dear.
Aside from some contrivance in the matter of Bone’s untimely end, this is a tale of great richness and subtlety, equally evocative whether dealing with adolescent turmoil or the small-town ’60s milieu.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-155-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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