Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...evil, preaches Greene (as he did in his anti-U.S. novel, The Quiet American), can be caused by the relatively innocent. Wormold's phony reports touch off a vicious series of reprisals from sources never quite labeled. The enemy kill and hound real people whom they suspect as Wormold's agents. He is himself abused by Cuban police and nearly poisoned at a businessman's lunch. The deadly joke reaches back to London, where the big boys recognize their mistake but do not dare admit it. The end is heavily ironic...
This is conceivably the only novel ever written in which a boy tries to seduce a girl in a recumbent church bell. The would-be lovers fail, but that is because the clapper gives off a frightful clang that scares them both frigid. All of this will come as no surprise to fans of British Novelist Iris Murdoch (The Sandcastle), a philosophy-teaching Oxford don and an intellectual pixy whose wit ends in tears, whose sentences are transparent while her meanings are opaque...
Author Murdoch mitigates the sordid in her story with a flow of wit that is civilized, unobtrusive and sometimes lethal. The novel achieves distinction in a series of brief sermons and reflections on the nature of God and the good that ought to make many an orthodox pulpit-pounding clergyman blush in envy. Yet the meaning of The Bell is muffled in final ambiguity, as the colony goes under in a tidal wave of newspaper scandal. With its strange but oddly exciting characters, its limpid prose, its sly wit and its ethical insight, The Bell unquestionably tolls...
From his first (1938) book of long short stories to his latest novel, Richard Wright has given proof that anger can sometimes command more attention than art. He has one string to his bow: the shameful plight of the Negro in the white man's world. His writing is graceless, and he uses it with the subtlety of a lynching. It is doubtful for just how many of his fellow Negroes he speaks. But it is impossible to read him without sharing his indignation...
There are two kinds of authors - those who write better than they plot and those who plot better than they write. With his 22nd novel, Veteran Nevil Shute again proves himself one of the best practitioners of Group 2. Shute's surefire system is to take some typical or moving theme -nuclear fallout in On the Beach, race prejudice in The Chequer Board, homeless children in Pied Piper. He weaves in plenty of stirring incidents and peoples his pages with strongly sympathetic, highly moral characters who land deep in a pit of trouble in the first chapter, are often...