Review by New York Times Review
IN A.L. KENNEDY'S brief, moving parable about a snake that comes to dinner and lingers for a lifetime, evil isn't an alien creature from another country. Rather, it arrives under our feet in the garden like a forgotten bracelet, tastes us amiably with its forked tongue, sleeps softly beside us on our pillow and, when we're lonely, sends us pleasant dreams across vast distances. Every so often, it might go offto explore new places and people, but it always returns home. And even when it's far away, it never stops whispering our name. "The Little Snake" takes readers from an Eden-like beginning to a post-apocalyptic wasteland and back again like one of those looping time-paradox narratives in a particularly perplexing episode of "Dr. Who." (Surprisingly - or perhaps not surprisingly at all - Kennedy has written some recent fictional spinoffs of the British science-fiction-as-parable television series.) This short novel's protagonist is a little girl named Mary who lives in a poorly governed city filled with elegant possibilities: "interesting songs and stories, foods and clothes and conversations." The inhabitants reside in "great towers" presided over by dancing colorful kites. Their apartments "contained beautiful pools to swim in, or to keep fish, or perhaps vast tanks containing large reptiles like crocodiles and blue iguanas. And they had larders as big as living rooms and living rooms as big as meadows and probably meadows in their basements that were as big as small counties with jeweled roller coasters and golf courses made of cake." But these vast spaces start to grow smaller when Mary is visited by a little snake named Lanmo, who advises her about all the things they don't teach in school, such as the significance of love and jungles, and the necessity of avoiding lions, bears and hippopotamuses. He protects her from nightmares - especially the ones that might arise now that she has a snake sleeping on her pillow. When she leaves her dying city, he leads her to a newer, brighter one. And, most of all, he instructs her about the nature of snakes like himself, the kind one never reads about in books, the kind that always, inevitably, shows its deadly sharp teeth to everyone it meets. A. L. Kennedy has long been a surprising and pleasurable writer. Her prose style and the way she tells stories seem unspectacular at first - a series of genuinely odd observations on the world, conducted by unhappy people - but through the strength of her emotional accuracy and an idiosyncratic, often profound sense of humor she creates absorbing entrapments. After entering Kennedy's world, it's hard to find a way out, except through the final pages. In her more "realistic" fiction, such as the World War II period-drama "Day" or her recent novel about surviving the daily confrontations of London, "Serious Sweet," distraught people think long and loud about themselves while, say, releasing a trapped bird from garden netting or enduring a painful visit to the gynecologist. There seems to be no situation, however awkward or mundane, in which Kennedy can't discover humor and humanity. In "The Little Snake," the swiftemotional slippages click along, one after another, sentence after sentence, like an intricate concatenation of rainbow-bright dominoes. Funny, surprising and unexpected, her individual sentences seem to follow inevitably from the equally surprising sentences that precede them - as when Lanmo embarks on one of his journeys through a world confusingly populated by motley humans: "And the snake passed, faster than threats or rumors, over the world. He met with many humans to do his work. He met a woman who loved the shape of bicycles leaning against walls and he met a boy who loved apples and a young woman who played the violin and who loved a young woman who played the flute and he met an old man who hated everyone he saw for reasons he told no one. And Lanmo sometimes met little girls, and they would remind him of Mary, and on those days, at the time when the snake knew it would be sunset in her country, Lanmo would send his friend especially wonderful dreams." Eventually, Mary grows old, and the little snake comes for her (as it must come for all of us). But even when the inevitable arrives, it feels inevitably surprising, slinking toward us through a garden of possibilities that grows wider as our steps grow smaller. Kennedy's prose - like the endlessly unreeling speculations of her most interesting characters - is simultaneously logical and illogical, sad and funny, simple and profound, turning over and over in endless permutations, like an elegant small snake wrestling against the constraints of its own shiny and menacing skin. 0 SCOTT BRADFIELD'S most recent book is "Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
A magical snake named Lanmo appears before a sad and lonely girl named Mary while she maneuvers the tiny confines of her rooftop garden in a city slowly being destroyed by war. Lanmo speaks to Mary in subtle and wise ways that belie his booming, mellifluous voice. In him, Mary finds a friend and protector, a spirit who understands her as no human can or does. For Lanmo's part, Mary provides a source of constant comfort as well as confusion. Though Lanmo must periodically slither out into the world, lethally monitoring and meddling in the affairs of humans, his bond with Mary is steadfast. As she ages from child to woman to elderly widow, Lanmo always reappears at opportune moments to guide her through the increasing losses that come with an encroaching war and incipient old age. Quietly astute and surprisingly engrossing, Kennedy's spare, old-fashioned fable about trust and faith, loyalty and love is a charming read with a hidden punch, providing a much-needed antidote to contemporary cynicism and doubt.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This inventive fable tells of a special snake, the young girl it befriends, and the things they learn from each other.Mary is "a remarkable, wise little girl" who enjoys a garden about the size of a big tablecloth atop a building in which the "pipes only leaked on Mondays and Wednesdays." Sometimes food is short, but her city is "filled with good things." Then a small golden snake named Lanmo appears. It is "immensely handsome," wise, agile, and possessed of "a beautiful speaking voice" that can be "like buttered velvet" or "like being hugged with warm towels after a long bath." The snake teaches the "Very Attractive Girls" at Mary's school not to be nasty partly by turning into "a giant glimmering golden cobra rising from the dirty tarmac of the playground." Kennedy (Serious Sweet, 2016, etc.) will doubtless charm many readers in the early pages of this novella, but it's soon clear that she has more in mind. For one thing, the snake leaves Mary and speeds around the world to remove from life those whose time has come. Yes, Lanmo, whose "tiny needle teeth shone white as bone," is the grim creeper. For another, when he returns to Mary from often long periods of biting, her life among the have-nots has worsened, until she must leave her city and seek a new life elsewhere. Kennedy manages the considerable feat of touching freshly and often amusingly on friendship, love, honesty, education, hunger, greed, aging, war, courage, and displacement without getting preachy or patronizing. Her own voice recalls Lewis Carroll and his gift for taking children and their challenges seriously while using language and logic to have fun in the process.A delightful read with the earmarks of a classic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
