Again, as in many of his recent short stories, Trevor devotes this immaculate new novel to the insidious legacy, the spreading stain, of random acts of violence—specifically those rooted in Ireland's "continuing battleground." The most richly kind and gentle of people—like the mill-owning Quintons of Kilneagh—can become the fools of fortune in the wake of violence, as recalled by William Quinton in the novel's first section. William remembers himself at age eight in 1918, tutored by Father Kilgarriff, a mysteriously unfrocked priest, in a "scarlet dining room fragrant with the scent of roses." He recalls his father, a "bulky, lazy-looking" man who favors a teddy-bear dressing gown and walking down a silent avenue of beech trees trailed by his dogs; pretty English-born Mother, who wields untroubled authority; two small sisters; and, in the "orchard wing" of Kilneagh, Aunt Fitzeustace of "notable jaw" and timid Aunt Pansy. But this rose-scented idyll will be blasted apart after the Quintons, foes of injustice, welcome revolutionist Michael Collins at Kilneagh: the children are thrilled and horrified by the obscene execution of Doyle, one of Father's mill workers, who has been spying for the Black and Tans. And then an English spy named Rudkin, Doyle's contact, will wave a friendly greeting on a street comer to Father and Willie—the day before Father's body smoulders on the stairs of Kilneagh, the two screaming little girls dying in flames. . . while bullets splatter and the dogs' barking abruptly stops. In the years that follow, while Mother sinks into grieving alcoholism, Willie finds cruelty and hatred at school but finds love with his English cousin Marianne. And though, after Mother dies of self-inflicted violence, Willie fulfills a vengeful legacy and leaves Ireland, Marianne will bear his child: Imelda, who'll be raised, fatherless, in the ruins of Kineagh, sealed into the bitter past by Marianne and those aging wraiths of the orchard wing. So, even decades later, the screams of burning children will still sound over the scent of roses—in the mind of mad, middle-aged Imelda. Like the story "Matilda's England" in Lovers of Their Time: a masterly tracing of the shadow of violence through time, muted but never canceled out by love—in a restrained, elegant, austerely affecting family-tale.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0143039628
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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