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Sam Kitchener in the Literary Review complained about John Irving’s one track mind:
If you promise to keep it from my mother and my girlfriend, there is probably something to the idea that transvestitism expresses profound truths about the multiple nature of human identity. Irving just lays it on a little thick. Almost everyone that Billy meets dances between gender boundaries. His grandfather, Harry, has a monopoly on female roles in the town’s am-dram productions; his father, William, had a similar monopoly in school plays. Even the local bully gets a sex change.
Read all reviews here.
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Taking the Hatchet to a Turkey…
Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail reckons that THREE KINGDOMS is certainly a turkey, but does it also make a goose out of us?
This show is magnificently bad, laughably awful, a real honking turkey (if turkeys honk). Even more perfect, it has been made with the financial support not only of us taxpayers in England but also of that European Capital of Culture wheeze. To manage that at a time of financial crisis elevates this to high art of the mickey-taking variety. And we complain that our politicians are out of touch!
Read all reviews here.
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Hatchet Job of the Day
In his review of Tim Parks’s THE SERVER, Chris Cox created some bad karma:
The interwoven narratives – Beth’s thoughts and the man’s late-night scrawls – evoke the Buddhist concept of dukkha (suffering borne of confusion). But sadly, the main suffering is done by the reader. Few middle-aged male novelists should attempt to inhabit the minds of “feisty” young women and Parks proves no exception. Beth’s inner monologue – replete with sexual fantasies – is unconvincing and embarrassing.
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It [Wolf Hall] was a hard act to follow. But the follow-up is equally sublime. In answer to what will surely be everyone’s first question about Ms. Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies: Yes, you can read it cold. Knowledge of Wolf Hall is not a prerequisite to appreciating what Bring Up the Bodies describes, because Ms. Mantel sets up her new book so gracefully. All of Cromwell’s scheming to expedite Henry VIII’s casting off of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, to marry Anne Boleyn is behind him. So is the schism with the Roman Catholic Church that the first book so thoroughly outlined, maneuver by crafty manoeuvre.
Janet Maslin, New York Times
VS
Mantel is an extraordinary novelist, a remarkable stylist, and rather a commonplace historian: a careful 2.1 and not a daring First. She aims to please us. For Cromwell, and hence for us as readers, the monasteries at the point of dissolution are inventories – lists of treasures, lists of crimes. Mantel never lets us suspect that the inspectors Cromwell sends to the monasteries are her rivals as fiction writers, and she squares their crass homophobia with our 21st-century sensibilities by allowing Cromwell to think all monastic homoeroticism is paedophilia – “prey[ing] on the younger and weaker novices” – rather than consensual relations between adults, with which their reports are in fact concerned. This is pitch-perfect for readers whose ideas derive from CJ Sansom’s detective fiction Dissolution.
Diane Purkiss, Financial Times
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Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.
____________________________________________________________________
Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.
Hatchet Job of the Day
Lauren Groff’s ARCADIA was mostly well reviewed, but Kapka Kassabova in the Guardian just didn’t get it:
The requited maternal ecstasy the author feels for Bit, combined with turgid storytelling results in a novel that could be a one-page love poem, and in that sense feels 288 pages too long. I became incredulous after I’d heard 100 times that for little Bit, “everything is rich with the incredible” and “his heart is so loud it overwhelms the day”. In the end, I felt as though I’d been on a numbing acid trip.
Read all reviews here.
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Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.
Orwell Prize Shortlist 2012
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Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.
Orange Prize Shortlist 2012
Click on the cover for the review roundup.
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Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.
Hatchet Job of the Week
Oh dear. Antonia Quirke in the Financial Times would like to point out that THE CABIN IN THE WOODS doesn’t really have a point to make, despite what the film-makers are trying to say…
A Truman Show-like satire on voyeurism? Man, that’s weak. All definitively feeble horror films are about voyeurism (you the viewer want to see blood and want to be punished for wanting, blah blah) and never add up to more than a low-level grumble about the situation. And anyway, voyeurism – because we all already know it’s wrong – is impervious to satire … The only comedy-horror that ever worked was An American Werewolf in London – and it worked because it was about character. It had a mood of its own. It was not run entirely by its genre.
So there.
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Understanding Tragedy
It’s autobiographical, it’s emotional and hard to sit through, it’s Eugene O’Neill: It’s A LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.
But according to Caroline McGinn in Time Out you’ll get a lot out of it…
O’Neill writes his family as crawling between the past and the future; striving to make it from what they have been to what they long to be; unable, except in moments of supreme self-sacrifice, to be more than what they are. His scorchingly honest portrait of them seems compelled by love as much as despair, which is why the experience of watching it is never depressing. This beautifully acted revival of ‘Long Day’s Journey’ sends you into the night elated, with the sense of something understood.
But Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail doesn’t get the same bolt of understanding…
What is O’Neill’s complaint here? Is there something genuinely tragic going on? Or are they just feckless failures who need to pull themselves together? I left the theatre without any sense of tragic cleansing or redemption. I just felt the glooms.
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Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.
