Dunmore’s crystalline prose is almost too good; the pain she describes is often unbearable to read, yet the emotional power...
Orange Prize winner (A Spell of Winter, 2001) Dunmore, whose prolific output ranges from grim realism (The Siege, 2002) to spellbinding fantasy (The Greatcoat, 2012), offers the heartbreaking internal struggle of a young soldier adjusting to life at home after World War I.
Daniel has returned to the ingrown, rigidly class-conscious Cornwall community where he grew up. Since his mother died while he was overseas, he moves to the isolated farm of Mary Pascoe, an ailing old woman. By the time the novel opens, Mary has died of natural causes after telling Daniel he can have the farm. Following her wishes, he has buried her on her land. The problem is that he hasn’t reported her death to the authorities. And the longer he waits, the harder it is to tell anyone, even Felicia, the younger sister of his best friend, Frederick. Frederick and Daniel always considered themselves blood brothers despite their differences in class and intellect. Frederick grew up with Felicia in a big house full of books that Daniel devoured as a child even after dropping out of school at 11 to support his already ailing mother. Giving up the scholarship he deserved, Daniel worked as a gardener while Frederick, a terrible student who could barely read, went off to boarding school. But their friendship persisted. When war came, Frederick became an officer. Daniel, a gifted marksman, chose not to become a specialist and found unexpected camaraderie in the company of other enlisted men. Now, despite the moments of respite, even joy, that Daniel experiences with Felicia—who has suffered her own losses—Daniel is haunted by memories of Frederick and unwarranted guilt. From the first page, Dunmore shares Daniel’s inner life, building an increasing sense of dread while exposing the tragedy of great promise thwarted by forces beyond Daniel’s control.
Dunmore’s crystalline prose is almost too good; the pain she describes is often unbearable to read, yet the emotional power resonates, and Daniel is impossible to forget.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2254-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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