Neither disjointed stream-of-consciousness scene changes nor gallons of wine can make a reader care for these characters.
A gardener slices through a backyard phone line in Stratford, Ontario, and a couple of theater people find their marriage disastrously unraveling—in this loose-limbed and hardly convincing latest by loquacious Canadian Findley (Pilgrim, 2000, etc.).
In the Clinton-Lewinsky summer of 1998, Jane Kincaid, originally from a wealthy family in Plantation, Louisiana, is a fairly contented artist and property designer who wants only to be able to buy the house she lives in with her husband, Griffin, a rising actor at Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival Theatre, and seven-year-old son Will. Bizarre events—a visit from an old high school boyfriend who then ends up dead in a fiery accident; sexual blackmail by Griff's director Jonathan Crawford, who withholds the best acting parts for sexual favors—send Jane into some heavy drinking of her favorite Australian wine. When the phone line is severed by the gardener, an Adonis enters Jane’s life in the form of the Bell repairman (he’s actually a young Pole named Milos Saworski who has a pious peasant wife and a sick baby), and a sexual crisis is precipitated. As Griffin moves away from her, seduced both by Crawford and by his own ambition, Jane lures the Bell boy to pose naked for her, both parents all the while ignoring son Will and the solicitous eyes of their loyal housekeeper Mercy. Findley is fond of convoluted plotting, but his tale this time around reads like a bored exercise in formula fiction. Variously, Jane’s southern belle background is explored, a local murder introduced, and Shakespeare’s plays analyzed, as if the author were fishing for any next angle to pursue. Moreover, Griffin’s unalloyed treachery in abandoning wife and child seems too evil to be assuaged by the happy ending that’s attendant.
Neither disjointed stream-of-consciousness scene changes nor gallons of wine can make a reader care for these characters.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019472-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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