"Someday, comrades, an imaginative mind may yet conjure up for us an ideal of a benevolent dictator: a man of steel who amasses power so he can give it back to the people he usurped it from; a philosopher-king who rights wrongs, balances economic inequities and still has the good sense to relinquish his control, who gets the trains to run on time and promptly splits town on the 5:15. You know, a fiction.
Until then, we’ll have to make due with the two garden-variety tyrants whose iron fists hang over the action of “Blood Kin,” Ceridwen Dovey’s precise and terrifying debut novel. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, for while the novel’s spell lasts, it can feel like the earliest, exhilarating days under a new administration, when a pliant populace is eager and willing to follow wherever a confident leader directs us.
In an unspecified place and time, an autocratic ruler identified only as “the President” is overthrown in a coup led by an equally enigmatic figure who calls himself “the Commander.” The abrupt transfer of power is explained to us piecemeal through the alternating perspectives of three men in the President’s employ — his portrait artist, his chef and his barber — who are now held captive in the deposed leader’s summer residence, as they continue their work as prisoners of the Commander."
[Image:
http://ceridwendovey.bookslive.co.za/]
(Excerpt from
DAVE ITZKOFF's New York Times review in the Sunday Book Review, published on April 6, 2008).
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