Not as surefooted as Vickers’s delightful Miss Garnet’s Angel (2001), but still a deliciously urbane and affecting love...
Wise and wryly tender tale in which a dead man’s divided affections lead to unexpected revelations—and alliances—as the women he loved learn to live without him.
Low-key and refreshingly unponderous meditations on the number 3, Purgatory, and forgiveness give Vickers’s already intelligent story appealing heft. Peter Handsome is in his early 60s when he’s killed in a London traffic accident. Wife Bridget, an antiques dealer who escaped her abusive father in Ireland as soon as she could, has since school found consolation in reading Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, to which she now turns as she grapples with sorrow. Her grieving is further complicated by a telephone call from Peter’s not-entirely-unsuspected mistress, 40ish Frances Slater, who works in an art gallery. The two women meet (“It seems discourteous, somehow, to Peter if we don’t meet, though I hardly know how we should conduct ourselves,” observes Bridget) and begin a fraught but surprisingly resilient friendship. They are soon joined by the good-looking Iranian boy called Zahin, who Peter once helped and who now claims to be studying engineering though he seems more interested in keeping house. As the three uneasily connect, a ghostly Peter keeps his eye on Frances and Bridget. This could be hokey, but on balance it works, as Peter recalls his past and his search for the perfect woman, which led him to an ultimately fatal relationship with Iranian prostitute Zelda. While Peter learns the redemptive ways of Purgatory, Bridget begins to make a new life, as does Zahin after certain confessions, and Frances also finds surprising new happiness.
Not as surefooted as Vickers’s delightful Miss Garnet’s Angel (2001), but still a deliciously urbane and affecting love story with an intriguing difference.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-17702-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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