Loitering with Intent (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The bare facts of Peter O’Toole’s existence are reasonably well known and quite unexceptional. Born in England in the depths of the Depression, he passed from infancy to youth amid the turmoil and moral certainty of World War II. Then came an occasional career in journalism, obligatory national service (in his case the navy), and, finally, a turn at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Although successful on the stage, he is best known for memorable film characterizations in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS, THE LION IN WINTER, and MY FAVORITE YEAR. In short, O’Toole is of a piece with that host of young men who swarmed out of the genteel poverty, political and economic, which was postwar England and laid claim to a new trans-Atlantic empire in literature and art.

Although, as a group, they exemplified the English upper class to countless audiences, few of them could lay legitimate claim to that status. O’Toole, for example, was the loving and loved child of an itinerant gambler and bookie, Patrick O’Toole, and the orphaned Constance Jane Eliot Ferguson, who gravitated into nursing. Patrick O’Toole was constantly in search of the pot of rainbow gold, while his patient wife gradually accustomed herself to the recognition that she would never have the comfortable life she sought in her youth.

But for all of that, it is obvious from LOITERING WITH INTENT, that O’Toole appreciated his parents to the fullest, and would not have had it any other way. It is impossible to conceive that anyone but the happiest and most secure of children could produce such an explosion of a book. O’Toole does not steal quietly into the reader’s mind, he wrenches the brain out of the cranium and pummels it madly.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIII, December 1, 1996, p. 619.

Boston Globe. February 7, 1997, p. D12.

Chicago Tribune. February 16, 1997, XIV, p. 8.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 16, 1997, p. 14.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, February 23, 1997, p. 26.

People. XLVII, February 24, 1997, p. 31.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, December 9, 1996, p. 53.

Sight and Sound. VI, November, 1996, p. 35.

The Spectator. CCLXXVII, July 6, 1996, p. 37.

The Times Literary Supplement. July 12, 1996, p. 13.

Vanity Fair. February, 1997, p. 80.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVII, February 2, 1997, p. 3.