An intriguing first novel by Dunne, an Irish journalist, that plays off a familiar ploy about Holocaust guilt in an unusual setting. Heinrich Obermayer is a highly successful industrialist, now living and thriving in Fernboro, a small Irish town. He has an Irish wife, Carmel, and an Irish son, Eamonn, and a secret from his German past. When a group of itinerants, Gypsy-like people called Travellers, settle on open ground near town, the locals are up in arms. The outrage cuts across class lines, uniting working-class families like the Sullivans and the nouveau riche Joe Murphy. At the same time it provides a political opportunity for the ambitious but unscrupulous Councillor Lehane and a dilemma for some crooked contractors. For Mary McCarthy, a Traveller, the sojourn provides a respite from the road life and a glimpse of how ``the quality'' lives, leading her into a longing for Eamonn. When tensions between the townspeople and the outsiders escalate, Obermayer finds himself drawn inexorably back into his memories of war, of service on the Russian front, and of a horrifying stint as an officer of a Sonderkommando unit, performing mass executions of Jews. With that nightmare in the back of his mind, he resists Murphy's attempts to bring him into the controversy until the rage of the locals erupts in violence and forces him to take sides. Dunne tells this story in a complicated, cinematic mosaic of flashbacks and cross-cutting, with a newspaperman's keen eye for the signifiers of class and caste. The story's development is predictable and the author cuts off the action at the climax, but there is much finely observed social commentary, even if it is buried in a somewhat obvious morality tale.
Pub Date: July 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-86327-392-0
Page Count: 157
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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