A penetrating, introspective twist on the morose-British-constable genre.
A policeman reflects on our potential for evil as he guards the corpse of a female child molester and murderer.
Thomson (Divided Kingdom, 2005, etc.) has produced a “no-one-done-it” that, though lacking in detective work, is tautly crafted and absorbing. Billy Tyler lives in uneasy truce with life. Unmotivated, he never sought promotion to sergeant; he questions why the joy has fled from his marriage to Sue; he worries about his daughter, who has Down syndrome; and he struggles with his feelings for his father, a now-dead jazz musician whom Billy met twice in his life. During his 12-hour shift guarding the dead woman, who died of natural causes after 36 years in prison, his task is to fend off publicity and the morbid souls who want a trophy from the famous child murderer. Over the course of an outwardly uneventful night, Billy confronts his experience of good and evil as he thinks back on the victims and predators in his own past. These include Sue's father, Billy's lover and his childhood chum Trevor. And then there's Raymond, a sadistic former schoolmate whose devil-may-care attitude Billy found compelling as a teenager. During these reflections, the murderer bursts into Billy's subconscious, goading him to ask her why she could have done what she did, to acknowledge that anyone, “if the circumstances were right,” might do what she did. In the wee hours, Billy confronts the potential for evil in himself.
A penetrating, introspective twist on the morose-British-constable genre.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26584-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.
A harrowing and fully imagined vision of dystopian America from Lee, who heretofore has worked in a more realist mode.
Lee’s oeuvre is largely made up of novels about Asians assimilating into American society (The Surrendered, 2010, etc.), and in many regards, this one is no different. Its hero is Fan, a young woman of Chinese descent who leaves her native Baltimore to find her disappeared lover, Reg. However, the near-future America she travels through is catastrophically going off the rails: The wealthy (or “Charters”) live in protected communities, the lawless “counties” are highly dangerous, while those like Fan in the struggling middle live and work in highly regimented communities designed to serve the Charters’ needs. (Fan worked in a fishery in Baltimore, renamed B-Mor.) Typical of dystopian literary novels, the circumstances that brought the country to this ugly pass aren’t clear (though social concerns about the environment and carcinogens are high). What Lee adds to the genre is his graceful, observant writing, as well as a remarkably well-thought-out sense of how crisis stratifies society and collapses morality. As Fan travels north from B-Mor, she encounters or hears about people who are actively brokering or sacrificing human life to survive. Lee’s imagination here is at once gruesome and persuasive: A family of circus-type performers who kill people and feed them to their dogs, a cloistered Charter housewife with a group of adopted children who are never allowed to leave their rooms, a doctor who accepts poor patients only to the extent they’re willing to prostitute themselves to him. The potency and strangeness of these characters never diminish the sense that Lee has written an allegory of our current predicaments, and the narration, written in the collective voice of B-Mor, gives the novel the tone of a timeless and cautionary fable.
Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59448-610-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir.
A torturer-in-hiding examined from multiple angles by family and victims.
In this third novel from Danticat (The Farming of Bones, 1998, etc.), the past has a way of intruding on everyday life no matter how all of the characters try to stop it. Of course, when the past is as horrific as it is here, that should come as no surprise. The title comes from a Haitian term for torturer, the black-hearted Tonton Macoutes who enforced the Duvalier regime (“ ‘They’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away’ ”). The particular dew breaker at the heart of this story is an old man when we first meet him, on a trip he’s taking with his artist daughter down to Florida to deliver a sculpture she’d been commissioned to make by a famous Haitian-American actress. Each chapter brings another view of this same man, who escaped his crimes in Haiti to hide out as a barber in Brooklyn, and each is related by different people who knew him—his wife, a lover, one of his victims. The structure, however, isn’t necessarily one of slowly revealed mystery, an approach that could have cheapened the tale’s formidable emotional impact. Even though we learn more and more about the dew breaker as the story progresses—and by the end have been firsthand witnesses to his foul methods—Danticat seems ultimately less interested in him than in those around him, those who speak personally about the suffering he caused. It’s a wise choice, in that there is comparatively little that can be learned from practitioners of evil, whose motives usually come down to simple desires for money or power. Danticat’s voice is that of a seasoned veteran, her pages wise and saddened, struggling on “the pendulum between regret and forgiveness.”
Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir.Pub Date: March 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4114-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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