John Dollar (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

“The English makes laws,” the old Indian woman Menaka (“Monkey”) reflects early in this novel. “He makes on law for men. He makes one law for women, a law for his children... The English would never fill rivers with corpses, he hides them instead in the ground... He buries his dead so the other white castes will not cook them and eat them.” Monkey knows the brutality of these egocentric, ethnocentric, and imperialistic “laws.” She also knows their fragility, having witnessed the English literally eating themselves when stranded on an uninhabited island they had set out from their colony in Burma to claim as a birthday gift for King George. The English here presume superiority over all, such as their colonized subjects: “We own them ... because we’re better. There isn’t anything we can’t own....”

While this novel is not told solely from Monkey’s perspective, its retrospective unfolding forces readers to share in her acquisition of knowledge about human bestiality. One of eight young girls stranded alone on the island with paralyzed John Dollar, she--the only Indian--and the rest “learned to do things . . . they’d never done before, things that marked them out as creatures, beings in the wild.” Indeed, how well they learn to be creatures in the wild will determine how long they survive. Without becoming predator or prey, Monkey survives as a female Ishmael, a witness to how murderous humans can be in dread of their extinction. “A girl must call upon her inbred nation if she’s to hold her own against the vagaries of nature,” Oopi’s father tells her. Oopi is the first of seven English girls to die in this terrifically readable novel.

Sources for Further Study

The Christian Science Monitor. March 20, 1989, p.13.

Kirkus Reviews. LVI, December 15, 1988, p.1772.

Library Journal. CXIV, January, 1989, p.104.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 26, 1989, p.3.

The New Republic. CC, March 27, 1989, p.35.

New Statesman and Society. II, February 10, 1989, p.39.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVI, June 15, 1989, p.12.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, February 19, 1989, p.3.

Newsweek. CXIII, February 20, 1989, p.64.

The Observer. February 21, 1989, p.50.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIV, November 18, 1988, p.68.

Tribune Books. February 12, 1989, p.7.

The Village Voice. XXXIV, March 21, 1989, p.50.