Ferociously imagined, intensely atmospheric, often powerfully compelling, but nonetheless weakened by far too many...
Best known for such vivid and thoughtful literary thrillers as Spider (1990) and Asylum (1997), McGrath extends his range with this ambitious historical melodrama, a tale both as seductively fascinating and as ungainly as its boldly imagined antihero.
Harry Peake, a fatherless and willful Cornishman (with just a dash of Emily Brönte’s Heathcliff in his makeup), sublimates his volatile energies to become a successful fisherman and smuggler (as well as a largely self-taught “poet”)—until he impetuously causes the devastating fire in which his wife perishes, leaving Harry permanently crippled and reduced to supporting himself and his young daughter by exhibiting his deformity (as “the Cripplegate Monster”) and unlikely book-learning, in the taverns of late–18th-century London. In a series of rich Hogarthian scenes, McGrath memorably portrays the mutually dependent love between Harry and the fiercely devoted Martha, his surrender to the curse of drinking that his always plagued him, and the subsequent act of violence that destroys their closeness and separates them forever. Meanwhile, the “scientific” interest taken in Harry’s unique physical condition by wealthy anatomist Lord Drogo—which eventually occasions the telling of Harry’s story, to the young narrator Ambrose, who relays it to us, with his own embellishments—results in Martha’s emigration to safety with relatives in Massachusetts Bay Colony, on the eve of the American Revolution. A rather tortured plot twist involves her in an exchange of secrets whose upshot ironically casts her as a heroine and martyr to the Revolution, and McGrath brings it all to an even more ironic conclusion, as Ambrose discovers the full truth of Lord Drogo’s machinations and of Harry’s arduous final pilgrimage toward forgiveness and rest.
Ferociously imagined, intensely atmospheric, often powerfully compelling, but nonetheless weakened by far too many reversals, surprises, and interlocking narrative levels. Martha Peake delivers the goods, but wraps them in so much complexity and fustian that their brilliance is needlessly shrouded and muted.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50081-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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