The clash of cultures and the blood of revolution form the contours of a long, uneven tale of the 18th-century slave uprising in Haiti. The prolific Bell (Save Me, Joe Louis, 1993, etc.) here undertakes the portrayal of legendary figure Toussaint L'Ouverture, the slave who started a revolution and whose intellect and noble cunning recast him as the Napoleon of the New World. Saint Domingue, with it's varied population of slaves and aristocrats, of Creoles and 64 different ranks of mulattoes, lived in an uneasy alliance that deteriorated with the onset of the French Revolution, which further splintered society into royalist and Jacobin camps. From this mix, Bell assembles a broad cast of characters to follow, beginning with the first whispers of unrest, into the heat of the savage rebellion, and to the fall of the French colony. The shifting perspectivesfrom the tales of escaped slave Riau, who tells of his time in Toussaint's army, to the journey of Dr. HÇbert, fresh from France to look for his missing sister, to the sadistic plantation owner Arnaudprovide a panoramic study of the revolt. But the principal character of this fiction is violence, ever present and speaking louder than the characters of flesh and blood. Bell provides an all too realistic depiction of the atrocities of both colonial life and war, describing rape and torturebeing flayed alive, slowly dismembered, and undergoing a host of other imaginative abominationsin the most minute, lengthy detail. This in some ways is the novel's failing. The bombardment of graphic imagery offers a realistic portrait but also detracts from the story of revolutionmaking violence the dominant theme and putting the important ideological questions that Bell raises in the back seat. A rousing and vivid account of the independence of Haiti, though at times overburdened by its own excesses.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43989-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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