Whatever its novelistic flaws, the rock criticism and pop-culture insights are sharp throughout.
In this entertainingly chatty novel, the Irish author revisits some characters from the well-received debut that launched his career, but he isn’t quite sure what to do with them.
The publication of The Commitments (1987) established Doyle as a master of the Irish vernacular, earning its place on the short shelf of great rock novels and inspiring a movie that reached an even wider audience. The prolific author has since written some novels that are even better than the first, though his recent output has been more erratic. This represents a return to form, not quite a sequel to that debut and not quite as good but a novel that shows how the musical generation he chronicled earlier is now dealing with mortality, family, nostalgia and all sorts of issues of getting older but not necessarily smarter (or, in some cases, happier). Protagonist Jimmy Rabbitte, who formed and managed the Commitments, is still a musical hustler, but now his racket is reuniting and reissuing music from bands of that earlier era, many of whom he holds in great contempt. It seems that even in the midst of an economic downturn, “[t]he middle aged are still finding the money to fund their nostalgia.” There’s a hilarious middle-aged, punk-rock duo—a married couple who break up (the band at least) during every session—and there’s another very funny episode about Jimmy’s response to one of his more popular musicians and the affair that musician seems to be conducting with a young staffer—which requires a series of apologies when Jimmy discovers that he has misjudged the relationship entirely. Much of the book is very funny, audaciously so, considering that Jimmy is suffering from bowel cancer, undergoing chemo (while reading Chemotherapy & Radiation for Dummies), cheating on his saintly wife and watching while the country’s entire economy goes down the toilet. Yet, it is full of loose ends—a reconciliation with his brother, the attempt to fake a recording from 1932—that the author never ties together, perhaps since Jimmy’s is not the sort of tidy life.
Whatever its novelistic flaws, the rock criticism and pop-culture insights are sharp throughout.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01643-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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