An unconvincing mishmash.
In this second novel about different generations of British entertainers, family secrets loom large, as they did in Stace’s debut Misfortune (2005); Stace is the pseudonym of singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding.
First, in the early 20th century, there was Evie Fisher, the premier ventriloquist of her time. Her son Joe, another ventriloquist, became famous when he entertained the troops during World War II. Joe’s daughter Frankie is a stage actress, and her teenage son George also seems destined for show business. That’s simple enough, but Joe’s dummy is also called George; the two Georges get alternate chapters, and when you throw in Joe’s wife Queenie, her second husband Reg (Joe was killed in WWII) and Frankie’s sister Sylvia (sshh, she’s only her half-sister), confusion sets in. When you add the mystery of George’s father (a married man, died in a car accident, never mentioned), confusion reigns. Something went badly wrong in Stace’s conception, to the extent that we never know whether he’s taking a lighthearted look at an obscure corner of vaudeville or doing a serious study of the toll secrets take on a family. Nor is it clear why so much attention is given to George’s unhappy years in the 1970s at a boarding school (whose arcane details will create more confusion for American readers), though his friendship with a depressed handyman there will become important in retrospect. George the human makes a big discovery when he unscrews the legs of George the dummy and finds some letters from his grandfather Joe to his one true love Bobbie, a ventriloquist and drag artist; Joe was a closeted homosexual forced into marriage by the scheming Evie. The discovery sends George into his own depression. This all seems pretty serious, but when at the end George confronts Frankie with an even more shattering discovery (his father’s true identity), his mother murmurs apologies, the moment passes lightly and attention shifts to Joe’s and Bobbie’s dummies united, whimsically, in a museum.
An unconvincing mishmash.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-83032-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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