Hook’s voice is at once seductive and frantic; the feverish, hallucinatory quality of the prose makes the book hard to...
Dark-hearted, sinuously plotted journey into the world of children’s literature.
Peter Hook, the narrator of this novel, is a classically paranoid personality. Raised in London, the child and intellectual heir of two troubled and brilliant ’60s dilettantes, he has lost the ability to make the distinction between fact and fiction, his own memories and the stories he has absorbed throughout his life. The structuring event of Peter’s life is the death of his younger brother when both were children. After his brother dies, his parents spend their time in frantic pursuit of an artistic mode angry and eloquent enough to express their loss. Peter, similarly haunted, turns to books and films, believing himself to be the only true citizen of the tribe of Peter Pan’s lost boys. He devours books, films, biographies, music and becomes a writer himself, authoring the Jim Yang series of children’s books. The novel is organized around Peter Hook’s psychic break; he has kidnapped Keiko Kai, a young boy set to play Jim Yang in a film. Peter tells the whole story to Keiko in a single night, obsessively noting the coincidences between his own life and the life of J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan. Both lost their brothers, both turned to children’s books as a way to express their outrage and sorrow, and both failed, according to Peter’s narrative, to find peace through writing. The text moves between a carefully researched and deeply felt biography of J.M. Barrie and the Davies children for whom Peter Pan was created, and an emotionally brutal description of Hook’s youth, spent under the benignly neglectful care of narcissistic adults. Barrie’s and Hook’s lives intertwine and reference one another, and the text moves effortlessly between the present and the past, which Hook stitches together with a series of cultural references drawn from the 19th-century London stage, Scottish folk songs, films of every decade, the Beatles song book and, of course, every version of Peter Pan.
Hook’s voice is at once seductive and frantic; the feverish, hallucinatory quality of the prose makes the book hard to resist.Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-18101-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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