Forever: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "There he is, three days after his fifth birthday, standing barefoot upon wet summer grass..." (more)
Key Phrases: spiral earrings, black patrol, old vows, New York, Mary Burton, Mary Morrigan (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This novel demands that the reader immediately suspend disbelief, but if this summons is heeded the reward will be a superior tale told by Hamill (Snow in August; A Drinking Life) in the cadence of the master storyteller. The year is 1741 and this is the story of Cormac O'Connor-"Irish, and a Jew"-who grows up in Ireland under English Protestant rule and is secretly schooled in Gaelic religion, myth and language. Seeking to avenge the murder of his father by the Earl of Warren, he follows the trail of the earl to New York City. On board ship, Cormac befriends African slave Kongo, and once in New York, the two join a rebellion against the British. After the rising is quelled, mobs take to the streets and Kongo is seized. Cormac saves Kongo from death, but is shot in the process. His recovery takes a miraculous turn when Kongo's dead priestess, Tomora, appears and grants Cormac eternal life and youth-so long as he never leaves the island of Manhattan, thus the "Forever" of the title. What follows is a portrait of the "city of memory of which Cormac was the only citizen." Cormac fights in the American Revolution, sups with Boss Tweed (in a very sympathetic portrait) and lives into the New York of 2001. In that year he warily falls in love with Delfina, a streetwise Dominican ("That was the curse attached to the gift: You buried everyone you loved"), and comes into contact with a descendant of the Earl of Warren, the newspaper publisher Willie Warren. His love, his drive for revenge and his very desire to exist are fatefully challenged on the eve and the day of September 11. This rousing, ambitious work is beautifully woven around historical events and characters, but it is Hamill's passionate pursuit of justice and compassion-Celtic in foundation-that distinguishes this tale of New York City and its myriad peoples.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Cormac O'Connor arrived in New York in 1741-and he's still there, having been granted immortality as long as he remains on the island of Manhattan.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (November 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316735698
• ISBN-13: 978-0316735698
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (180 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #18,819 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great combination of history and magic, January 2, 2003

By	A O Cazola (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Forever: A Novel (Hardcover)

Pete Hamill is a legend of New York, and FOREVER feels very much like his magnum opus. It's a wonderfully well thought-out and well researched history of New York City as told through the eyes of one fictional character.

Cormac O'Connor, a young 18th Century Irishman, through an accident in the street and a colision with a mystical destiny finds himself travelling to make a new life in America in the 1740s. Here, he becomes embroiled in a quest for justice, power and vengeance against the man who drove him from Ireland. After an encounter with a powerful shaman, Cormac finds himself granted a power that can be the greatest blessing or the darkest curse...immortality. the only condition is that he never leave Manhattan Island.

The following 250 years trace Cormac as he witnesses and becomes part of the development of NYC. Watching him through the slave revolt, the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the great New York fire, the nineteenth century boomtimes and the tragic events of September 11th, we see Cormac experience life's great emotions, love, loss, success and failure.

Combining a beautiful telling of Celtic mythology with a rich and vibrant civic history, Pete Hamill has created two truly remarkable characters...one is Cormac o'Connor and the other is the City of New York.

Read FOREVER and be glad that you did. It is certainly worth it.

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good history, but the characters just didn't come alive, March 26, 2003

By	Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Forever: A Novel (Hardcover)

This novel has a lot going for it. It's by Pete Hamill, a New York City columnist who understands the gritty realities of the city and whose writing is clear and to the point. It's therefore as much about the history of New York City as it is about the lead character. The plot is unique too. A young Irish man, Cormac O'Conner, comes to New York City in 1740 and is given eternal life - just as long as he doesn't leave the borough of Manhattan. Well, that's a book I can relate to. I live in Manhattan myself, and figure that even if I don't travel much, I do live in the best place in the world. And so I expected to embrace this book completely.

At 613 pages, this is a novel to sink into. I looked forward to picking it up again every time I had to put it down. There's a lot of action and colorful images and a true sense of New York City through the years. There's love and war and a quest for revenge. Obviously, the author did a lot of research. However, he tried just a little too hard to make Cormac politically correct at all times, fighting injustice, particularly against African Americans, throughout the book. And, just in case the reader forgets the fact that Cormac has eternal life, the author has him constantly reflecting on the history we have just seen him live through. This is all right up to a point, but it's unnecessarily repetitive and often bogs down the story.

The book is strongest at its beginning and ending sections. The beginning really gets into the life Cormac led in Ireland as well as his early years in New York. And the last section, which incorporates the recent 9/11 tragedy into the narrative, is full of tension, especially since I knew it was coming and kept wondering how the author would have the story play out. I did enjoy the book, but it was more from a point of view of "isn't this interesting" instead of getting deeply involved with a complex character. Also, even though Cormac talks about the fact that he cannot leave Manhattan Island, it's mostly talk. There is no plot development that seriously puts him on the brink of a bridge or tunnel or river landing with a decision about leaving Manhattan to make.

The book is an excellent review of New York City history as well as a narrative of both the Irish and the African American experience in this city. However, it lacks in making me really care about the characters. However, I did find myself drawn back again and again to the book and wanting to find out what happens next. I therefore do recommend it, especially for New York lovers with an interest in history.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Magical history, April 26, 2006

By	Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Billed as a piece of "old-fashioned storytelling at a gallop" [cover quotation from the Washington Post], this swashbuckling tale certainly lives up to the description, although the gallop has a few wild leaps in it. Blacksmith's son Cormac O'Connor emigrates to New York from Ulster in 1740. There, he is given the magical gift of staying young forever, provided that he never leaves Manhattan, and that he "truly lives." Cormac is an attractive character: a fighter and a lover, friend of the dispossessed, and increasingly adept as a linguist, artist, and musician. But the real hero may be the city of New York, seen at various periods from the early days to the present. Hamill the historian is every bit as good as Hamill the storyteller.

I have remarked in other reviews on the tendency of several recent novelists to play around with the way their central characters experience time -- a sort of American Magic Realism. In Andrew Sean Greer's THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI, the hero lives his life backwards. In Audrey Niffenegger's THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, he skips around freely in time. In Salman Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, he ages two years for every one. All three writers use their device both to generate suspense and to focus more clearly on the inner life of the character. But while the immortality granted to Hamill's hero makes a wonderful means of displaying the changing face of the city, it greatly reduces the reader's interest in the character himself.

It is significant that many reviewers on this site praise the opening third and the last quarter of the book, for both these extended sections tell a relatively straightforward story over a single span of time, the one a tale of revenge and discovery in the 1740s, the other a love story in 2001. The intervening sections, set in the American Revolution, the New York cholera epidemic, and the time of Boss Tweed, contain interesting material but develop little momentum or continuity. It is hard to invest in a hero whom one knows cannot be killed, who does not age and so has no continuing friends, and who must keep reinventing himself every few decades so as not to draw attention to his eternal youth. The story of Cormac's growing awareness of his world in adolescence is gripping because his education happens painfully in real time, knowledge born out of tragedy and the need for courage and compassion. But later, when all it takes to master a new language or new skill is to devote himself to it for thirty years or so, the process just seems too easy. One can still take pleasure in Cormac's flesh and blood in the short term (parts of the book are splendidly erotic), but in the long term he has no reality at all.

The "old-fashioned storytelling" compliment applies mostly to the first section of the book. The last portion, by contrast, is more complex, more truly novelistic. Hamill has told how he first finished the book on September 10, 2001, but then felt he had to go back and add chapters leading up to the attacks on the Twin Towers. This final section has quite a different momentum from the rest, because it is clearly driving towards a terminus rather than moving aimlessly outwards from a distant beginning. It also contains the most nuanced personal relationships in the book. But in thus changing the tone, Hamill gets into trouble reconciling the simple moral absolutes of the earlier part of the book to the less black and white world of the present day; it is as though he had been writing an Old Testament, and suddenly found himself in the midst of the New! I cannot say that all the resolutions are satisfactory, but the last moment of all, when Cormac returns to the place where he had originally been given his immortality, contains a touch of surprising grace that, to me, feels exactly right.