Intricately constructed and powerful.
Northern Irish writer Park (Swallowing the Sun, 2004, etc.) chillingly and entertainingly envisions the entanglements of a South African–style Truth and Reconciliation tribunal in post-Troubles Belfast.
The eponymous commissioner is Henry Stanfield, a lawyer and aging ladies’ man who wears his self-conscious rectitude like a cravat. It threatens to become a noose, though, when his estranged and pregnant daughter asks him to watch out for her friend, the sister of a petty thief and informer named Connor Walshe who vanished in 1990. Stanfield is slated to preside over the truth commission’s investigation of Connor’s disappearance. The noose tightens when Stanfield is confronted with compromising photos and nudged to whitewash the case. The memories and testimony of three principals, all well realized, flesh out the story of what happened to Connor. Retired policeman James Fenton was the teenage informer’s handler. “Danny,” a groundskeeper in Florida, has done all he can to banish memories of the day when, as an 18-year-old named Michael Madden, he drove Connor into the countryside for interrogation and witnessed his fate. Francis Gilroy, the government’s new Minister for Children and Culture, has every reason to cover up what he did as an IRA honcho in 1990. There are occasional glitches, especially in the account of Danny’s life in America, and Park seems to lose interest along the way in having his title character occupy the narrative’s center, but the novel is fast-paced and chilling, a pleasing hybrid of literary fiction and political thriller. The truth, we discover again and again, may be fragile and malleable, a commodity to be wrangled over, tweaked, rationed, buried—yet it’s also unpredictably powerful, finding channels through which to course despite the lies meant to divert it.
Intricately constructed and powerful.Pub Date: March 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-456-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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