4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lyrical writing on how we witness war, love, and passion, January 22, 1999
By A Customer
If you haven't tried Donald Harington's perceptive, word-musical, and searching fiction before, this new novel is an excellent place to start. You'll want to sample some of his other nine books when you're finished. He turns a small corner of Arkansas into a meeting point for universal themes and well-shaped characters.
Harington has used the "witness," as a commentator on the actions of others in his novels, to great effect elsewhere. In his "Some Other Place," a literate ghost narrates the actions of an inquiring pair of lovers -- even turning some of his observations into poetry. In what may be his strongest narrative, "The Choiring of the Trees," a story of a brutal miscarriage of justice is told in part through the sensibilities of a brilliant landscape artist.
This new novel becomes utterly captivating by fully carrying out Harington's "single ambition that motivates my work," which is "to make the reader part of the story." (Quoted in a newspaper story that I wrote about Harington. For the Web address, feel free to e-mail me.)
Here, the witness is neither a lively spirit nor an interpreting artist, but a young boy -- close in age and circumstance to Harington himself, but not quite. He becomes a voyeur, in the strictest sense of "one who sees." It's not strictly out of matters of sexuality, although Harington includes a sensitive coming-of-age plot for his 11-year-old protagonist.
Instead, young Donny is plunged into a whirlwind of changes that come with his small Arkansas town, Stay More (the venue for all of Harington's novels), being finally touched early in 1945 by the long arm of World War II.
All that is left in the single street of Stay More are the children, with the men at war and the women tending homes. They have re-created the war through two rival play-gangs, but never quite connect with what the real "Allies" and "Axis" are perpetrating abroad.
Donny comes closest, by following his admiration for war journalist Ernie Pyle into creating a gel-printed "newspaper" for tiny Stay More. The irony in his being so observant of events is that none really happen ... that is, until the hollow unexpectedly becomes the site for an Army training maneuver, and Donny is not allowed (at first) to write fully about it. Events soon overtake both the town children and the visiting soldiers, with tragedies that go beyond anyone's capacity to observe or to report.
The irony is redoubled by how Harington shows a sad universal fact of growing up: Donny's journey of learning about budding sexuality, mutability, and death is far more worth his reporting than what he tries to eke out in writing his free newspaper, but he doesn't grasp this until he's suffered many personal losses.
What in turn enfolds all of these events is a conscious involvement of the reader, in the words (and even actions) requested on the part of the young narrator. Harington is not subtle about this, and it is part of the novel's charm. One isn't simply reading about a young boy marveling at the girl he loves bathing in a brook ... one is pulled into being present at that moment of tremulous discovery.
In the same way, a literally deafening experience at the novel's climax is translated into the harsh music of words. Harington has done this before, most fully in his "Lightning Bug," but never with the sounds inside one's head, and he shows yet more mastery of the power of language.
Once you dip your toe into Swains Creek, the fickle stream that runs through Stay More, you'll want to come back. Harington's other books have spun its history (back to the 1840s), passions, stark choices about life and death, and slow decline. He's told these stories through chronicle, allegory, meditation, memoir, tall tales, analysis, and now "reporting." All of this examination of one stretch of earth has made it a locus for universal truths. It's also been the spark for compelling writing. Try it for yourself!
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a remarkable, ambitious novel by an imaginative writer, September 22, 1998
Dawny, an inquisitive, sensitive boy, is the narrator of this enchanting novel set in the small town of Stay More in the Ozarks of Arkansas during World War II. A journalist himself, Dawny dreams of becoming the next Ernie Pyle, and it is his unique voice, that of observer and writer, which hold the reader spellbound from begining to end of this sweetly comic yet also darkly frightening tale. The children of Stay More, dividing themselves into two rival groups, the Allies and the Axis, become in Donald Harington's skilled hands a microcosm of what's going on in the war overseas. While the world loses its innocence to the cruelties of war, Stay More's children also begin to lose their innocence. The golden glow of childhood disappears beneath the dark shadow of approaching adulthood. Powerful in its impact, When Angels Rest is a remarkable, ambitious novel. A fanciful and imaginative writer, Harington draws his characters with love, ultimately showing us--his "Gentle Readers"--how we need to love the world if we truly want to save it. P.S. I am so glad that I, once again, ignored Kirkus and gave this fine novel a chance.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A remarkable, ambitious novel by an imaginative writer, September 15, 1998
An inquisitive, sensitive boy, called Dawny, is the narrator of this enchanting novel set in the small town of Stay More in the Ozarks of Arkansas during World War II. A journalist himself, Dawny dreams of becoming the next Ernie Pyle, and it is his unique voice, that of observer and writer, which holds the reader spellbound from beginning to end of this sweetly comic yet also darkly frightening tale. The children of Stay More, dividing themselves into two rival groups, the Allies and the Axis, become in Don Harington's skilled hands, a microcosm of what's going on in the war overseas. While the world loses its innocence to the cruelties of war, Stay More's children also begin to lose their innocence. The golden glow of childhood disappears beneath the dark shadow of approaching adulthood. Powerful in its impact, "When Angels Rest" is a remarkable, ambitious novel. A fanciful and imaginative writer, Harington draws his character with love, ultimately showing us -- his "Gentle Readers"-- how we need to love the world if we truly want to save it. P.S. I am so glad that I once again ignored the typical Kirkus "comments" and took a chance on this wonderful novel!
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