Overwrought and overlong. Horsy symbolism and metaphors of rebirth can’t tie this confusing tale together, and a lot of it...
Three books in one never quite cohere, in the first US appearance for this bestselling British author.
Intertwined lives and eras add up to a scattershot fictional history of England from 1850 on, centering on the village of Church Norton, near an ancient image carved into a chalk hillside centuries ago: a leaping horse. In no particular order, we meet brave Harry Latimer, a cavalry soldier, fighting and suffering in the Crimea; and Rachel, his brother Hugo’s beautiful wife, and their unborn child who is “no more than a pulsing, translucent comma of flesh in Rachel’s womb” when Hugo dies. Ere long, Harry, too, expires dramatically amidst the buttercups with his mare Clemmie; then it’s forward to the present where skinny Stella, “a butterfly bruised but as yet unbroken on the wheel of adulation,” seeks solace from the pain of a failed love affair and the diminishing expectations of her singing career (she’s lead vocalist for a trendy band called Sorority). A late-night journey into her soul leads her somehow to a hillside where she comes across yet another mare in the throes of a difficult birth. Fortunately, her lover Robert soon arrives to help out. Then there’s Spencer, an American veteran of WWII who once loved a girl from Church Norton: Janet, an English rose if ever there was one. But first, a flashback to the rustic hamlet of Moose Draw, Wyoming, and Spencer’s adolescence, featuring the local girl he loved and may have impregnated, and, yes, more horses. (In a self-conscious aside, the author notes that there are many English people in Moose Draw.) Flash forward to the early 1960s and Spencer’s attempt to reunite with Janet. Meanwhile, 40 years in the future, Stella and Robert successfully deliver a wobbly foal.
Overwrought and overlong. Horsy symbolism and metaphors of rebirth can’t tie this confusing tale together, and a lot of it is simply silly.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-29086-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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