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The Darling
by Russell Banks
The acclaimed author of Affliction and Continental Drift returns with a political thriller about (fictional) wife, mother, and radical Hannah Musgrave, a former member of the Weather Underground who moves to Liberia, befriends (real-life) warlord and president Charles Taylor, and then follows him back to America after he flees embezzlement charges.
HarperCollins, 400 pages
10/01/2004
$25.95
ISBN: 0060197358
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
Historical Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Donna Seaman
As compulsively readable as it is eviscerating in its dramatization of cultural divides, political mayhem, psychotic violence, and profound alienation. [Aug 2004, p.1870]
Kirkus Reviews
Banks never makes it easy, but this is worth reading as a warning to anyone not chary of the children of privilege. [15 Jul 2004, p.643]
Publishers Weekly
A rich and complex look at the searing connections between the personal and the political, this is one of Banks's most powerful novels yet. [2 Aug 2004, p.49]
Washington Post Wil Haygood
His are big novels, with daring, sweep and depth. In The Darling, he is working at full strength, and readers are in his debt.
The Guardian Mike Phillips
The Darling is an urgent, passionate, compelling panorama.
The Independent James Urquhart
Banks has cleverly grafted a bruising, fast-paced plot on to some gruesome events in Liberia's recent history, but the vitality of his narrative has its edges flattened by Hannah's emotional numbness.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Michael Winter
The Darling is a novel that refuses, curiously, to be intimate. [16 Oct 2004, p.D24]
The New York Times Book Review Mary Gordon
"The Darling" is not a perfect book -- its very expansiveness of vision and range make that almost impossible -- but it is admirable, compelling, always surprising and never cliched.
The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Much like Banks' Cloudsplitter... The Darling inserts a fictional hero into the crossroads of history, which he illuminates with fresh insight.
Boston Globe Andy Solomon
Hannah's story shows why Banks ranks among our boldest artists. He creates a narrator we believe despite finding her neither likable nor credibly self-aware.
Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Banks has taken one imagined life and crammed into it every question he could about personal politics as they relate to political action, and vice versa.
Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
As always, Banks is a relentlessly compelling storyteller.
The Economist
This story never quite sheds a nagging sense of being invented. Even so, The Darling is well crafted and courageously conceived.
Village Voice Joy Press
This inability or unwillingness to bring Hannah's African family to life feels like a major failure on Banks's part, in a book otherwise reverberating with ideas and startling prose.
The Nation Deborah Scroggins
Banks is such a master storyteller, and has thought so deeply about the issues of race and power at hand, that there is much to savor here.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
In the end, Mr. Bank's failure to turn Hannah into a credible individual, combined with his tendency to sanctimoniously italicize the larger meanings of her story, results in a novel that is fundamentally flawed, despite its thrumming narrative drive.
PopMatters Stephen M. Deusner
Most of the novel's flaws can be traced back to the rushed first section, which leaves Hannah's later motivations frustratingly underexplained and unclear.
Library Journal Edward B. St. John
Hannah herself is utterly unconvincing, both as a revolutionary and as a woman, and it is impossible to feel much sympathy for her. [1 Sep 2004, p.136]
Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
Severely disappoints.
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Gathman
With this story and a writer of Banks' stature, one expects great things. Unfortunately the novel doesn't live up to those expectations.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 1 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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