Smart, but echoing too familiarly.
Canadian composer, performer, and now first-novelist MacLachlan attempts a penetrating look at man’s vile desires in a same-old serial killer tale, transported in time to 1852.
“It is impossible to overestimate how truly unbalanced London became during the Chokee Bill panic,” so why try? But that’s the question posed by this examination of press sensationalism, mid-19th-century-style. The murderer in question, already in custody, was nicknamed by London columnist Whitty, who, unlike his editors, at least has a soul: “When the racy ones come a cropper, what hope remains for the high-minded stuff?” But Whitty’s not so high-minded as to turn it down when Owler, a seller of crime stories, offers a partnership to interview Chokee Bill. And when the interview happens, might Whitty begin to wonder whether the right man is really in jail, and might Chokee Bill know who the real killer is, and might he help them find him, and might this all smack a little too much of similar tales already deeply lodged in the collective unconscious? No matter. Beneath the surface here is the suggestion that the lurid hunger of the modern imagination owes its craving to a time even more removed than Jack the Ripper. Whitty’s tour will take him through the bowels of a London on the brink of a sadistic modernity: seedy brothels, cellar mazes, the offices of unscrupulous editors, the parlors of women whose appetites are the invention of erotica, a Piccadilly that “churns in a grey whirlpool of hard-shelled beings like stones in a river, clattering across the cobbles,” and into subterranean chambers and passageways. But as exhaustive as all this is, one wonders whether Gray ever stopped to consider that his artifact wasn’t exactly the object he hoped to criticize: more than the murderer here, the media is the target, but it’s never clear that the project manages to escape the gravity of its own critical insight.
Smart, but echoing too familiarly.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28284-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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