A writer who knows his characters and setting creates a compelling, timely work.
Australian novelist Flanagan’s creepy, heavy-handed suspense tale develops around a Sydney stripper caught tragically in a media-frenzied terrorist hysteria.
At the Chairman’s Lounge, an upscale gentlemen’s club in Sydney, works a 26-year-old pole-dancer known as Krystal, or more often, the Doll, though her real name is Gina Davies—a dark-skinned loner who ran away from western Australia when she was 17 and has saved nearly $50,000 from her years dancing to escape to a new life. However, a series of unfortunate events shatters that dream when she spends the night with a fabulously rich, handsome, young foreign stranger, Tariq al-Hakim, a computer programmer and cocaine smuggler, with whom she is photographed entering his apartment house. At the time, the police are looking for a suspected terrorist in the recent bombing at Homebush Olympic Stadium, and Tariq, apparently, is their man, along with his suspected lady accomplice, the Doll, whose photograph is plastered all over the news. Enter the recently demoted second-rate TV newscaster Richard Cody, who frequents the strip club and recognizes the Doll—and a way to bolster his sagging on-air ratings. He begins shamelessly to pump the story in the news so that a veritable manhunt ensues for the stripper, who out of fear and a drug-induced muddle-headedness (cocaine, Zoloft, Stemetil) rejects the idea of turning herself in, and, with the help of her friend, fellow stripper and single mom Wilder, dyes her hair blond and goes into hiding. Nothing will stop Cody, however, especially when Tariq is found dead near the Doll’s apartment; and the poor stripper’s fate as the Unknown Terrorist is sealed. Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish, 2001) narrates the story from a position of godlike omniscience, making grim pronouncements on society’s rampant discrimination and fear of foreigners. His tender characterization renders Gina Davies’s tale mightily plausible, and terribly sad.
A writer who knows his characters and setting creates a compelling, timely work.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-1851-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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