A first novel that vividly evokes the depressing decay and corruption of a place—West Africa—where things have so fallen apart that revolution becomes palpably imminent, while romance (in this case, between two expat Americans) remains less than compelling. Set in Sierra Leone in the recent past, just before the revolution that destroyed a once relatively prosperous country, the story begins as protagonist Robert Kelley is finishing up his development project on the coast and planning to join his lover Marie in Freetown. Robert is one of those expats who can never really go home again: he enjoys living in the bush, frequently indulges his drug habit, and has no qualms about bedding any number of women. In fact, he seems to indulge in so much risky behavior that it’s hard to believe he’s as efficient an administrator as we—re told he is. Marie, working on women’s issues in nearby Mali, is not pleased with his behavior either, and when the two meet again in Freetown, where Robert has just agreed to take on another development project, they quarrel. She goes back to Mali, while Robert, who has badly cut his foot and refuses to take care of it despite the admonitions of the Embassy doctor, prepares for his new job. With a team of local scientists, such as Prince and Daniel (whose qualifications and talents are ill-used by a rapacious regime that has destroyed the economy), he heads into the bush. The team is to conduct a survey for an aquaculture project under development, but when they meet up with a band of renegade soldiers, most of the men are murdered. Robert manages to escape, but by now his infected foot is gangrenous. Delirious, he finally reaches the coast where he once lived, but his foot can’t be saved. As he recovers, the political situation deteriorates and he decides to return to Marie in Mali. Strong as reportage, but the storytelling itself—together with sketchy, not-always-credible characters—follows weakly along.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-012-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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