Faulks knows exactly how to keep the reader off-balance in this deft, funny, scary combination of suspense and psychic...
The gifted British Faulks (Human Traces, 2006, etc.) rings changes on the untrustworthy narrator technique with this titillating, ultimately engrossing study of a loner with a dark past.
Mike Engleby is at Cambridge University in 1973, a student from a poor background on a full scholarship. As he tells us his story, often engagingly (his vignettes of the faculty are razor-sharp), it becomes clear he keeps to himself, whether he’s drinking, doing drugs or driving around country villages. But the name of one fellow student keeps coming up: Jennifer Arkland. He goes to lectures with her and later, as one of the crew, participates in an experimental student film in Ireland; Jennifer has a lead role. However, when he steals a letter she’s written to her parents, he realizes he’s just a footnote in her life, a joke. Mike started stealing at Chatfield, the terrifying private boarding school he attended, also on scholarship; it boosted his “morale,” which needed boosting after incessant vicious bullying by older boys and beatings by his father. What’s really chilling, though, is Mike’s casual admission that in time he became a vicious bully himself. Back in Cambridge, the big news is that Jennifer has disappeared. The police search Mike’s rooms, but fail to discover Jennifer’s diary, Mike’s latest theft. Might Mike have “stolen” Jennifer? Possibly, but it’s a big leap from obsession to abduction, though he’s clearly maladjusted, unlike Jennifer (the marvelous diary entries reveal a radiantly happy, normal young woman). Life goes on, Jennifer is not found and Mike eventually becomes a successful journalist in London. Then the past returns, and it is devastating. If Mike has not been leveling with us, it’s because of involuntary memory loss. We finally learn the gripping truth about what happened in Cambridge, even as we ponder the nature of the self.
Faulks knows exactly how to keep the reader off-balance in this deft, funny, scary combination of suspense and psychic exploration.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52405-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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