A cynical story about how, in the absence of moral courage, terror and self-preservation can also be powerful motivators.
Sympathy may be a virtue, but it can also get you into plenty of trouble.
The author, who established himself as a maker of intricate puzzles with his first novel, The Quincunx (1989), provides another in this wartime tale of a family’s efforts to protect a young girl from a vicious enemy. This is not a portrait of World War II Europe or a fictionalized account of Anne Frank’s life. Palliser is interested less in external details than in the situation’s psychological aspect, exploring the pressures building inside an ordinary family plunged into an extraordinary situation. The narrator, an unnamed bookkeeper in an unnamed European city, describes the invasion of his country and the way one of his younger daughter’s schoolmates comes to live with them. The girl’s wealthy parents, who are on a trip, have been cut off by the invasion. The narrator feels sorry for her, but his feelings are hardly altruistic. He hopes the girl’s father “would be so grateful that he would reward me with a well-paid post” when he returns. The girl, who seems appreciative at first, proves to be a master manipulator with a “mere veneer of charm” who sets the family members against each other. Though they realize they’ve made a mistake, they hesitate to send her home. They’ve already told too many lies to snooping neighbors and worry about being found out. They also cling to the hope of getting a reward even when it’s clear this isn’t going to happen. The girl belongs to an unspecified ethnic community targeted for destruction by the country’s new “puppet dictatorship,” whose sinister plan is hidden behind a seemingly beneficial agenda. Palliser gradually tightens the screws in various ways and the family keeps hiding the girl not out of any deep moral sense but because it’s too late to do anything else. Some readers may feel this plot could have been explored in a novella or short story, but Palliser manages to keep up the tension as his narrative drives to its tragic, unsettling end.
A cynical story about how, in the absence of moral courage, terror and self-preservation can also be powerful motivators.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771838856
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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