Despite the borderline pretentious discussions of philosophy and theology, Harrison’s elegant prose and deeply felt...
Irish filmmaker Harrison’s cerebral yet emotional first novel shows how a “brief moment of continuity between two lovers” can have stark and long-lasting consequences.
In 2012 Belfast, deeply religious 38-year-old car mechanic–turned-preacher Samuel Orr, a happily married father of three young sons, falls into a passionate if unlikely affair with 26-year-old Anna Stuart, a Beckett scholar at Queen’s University. Their sexual attraction burns with fervor, but Harrison also wants his readers to view the affair in philosophical terms with his references to Beckett and transgressive literary philosopher Georges Bataille. An academic intellectual with poetic leanings, Anna is drawn to the way Orr sees “no line between the sacred and the profane.” When she becomes pregnant, Orr tells his wife straightforwardly about the affair while acknowledging that he doesn’t know what he plans to do. He continues to see Anna yet remains stalwart in his faith in God and himself. Then Orr’s wife dies—whether accidentally or on purpose is left unclear—when struck by a train. Orr’s oldest son, 12-year-old Philip, begins to demonstrate a quiet fury against his father; Anna senses the boy embodies his father’s sense of guilt. When Anna’s baby, named Samuel after both Beckett and Orr, is almost a year old, Orr breaks off their relationship. Philip’s rage against his father becomes psychological warfare that culminates in violence. Cut ahead 35 years to a near, non–science-fiction future. Philip has disappeared. Anna has become an accomplished poet and married an artist. Sam Orr works at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and has brought his father, Samuel, now a blind old man, from Ireland to live with him. One day Philip shows up at the museum, and the careful world Sam, a repressed gay man, has erected shatters. The three Orrs must face their capacity for faith, vengeance, and forgiveness as well as their bonds of family love.
Despite the borderline pretentious discussions of philosophy and theology, Harrison’s elegant prose and deeply felt characters create a novel with a fiercely beating heart.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-328-84966-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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