Readers who willingly lost themselves in Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost should know that King has written its...
An unusually literate historical mystery—the imposingly accomplished second novel from the Canadian-born British author of the nonfiction Brunelleschi’s Dome (p. 1261) involves a mild-mannered London bookseller in a scholarly search that rapidly mutates into a dauntingly labyrinthine intrigue
In 1660, widower Isaac Inchbold reluctantly leaves the musty confines of his establishment and travels to Pontifex Hall, the Dorset estate of Alethea Greatorex, Lady Marchamont. Isaac is engaged to find the only existing (unpublished) copy of a manuscript lost when the Hall was occupied by Cromwell’s soldiers during the recently concluded civil war: the Labyrinthus Mundi of Hermetic philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, a renegade work very likely a candidate for “the Vatican’s catalogue of forbidden books.” Once this delicious premise is established, King alternates Isaac’s tale of his increasingly convoluted adventures with others (presumably reconstructed out of his research) involving Emilia Molyneux, a handmaiden to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Holy Roman Emperor’s librarian Vilem Jirasek, and the reappearing specters of three murderous black-clad horsemen. An “underground river” threatens the foundations of Pontifex Hall—just as Isaac’s safety, and perhaps sanity, are assailed by contradictory evidence interpreted from the writings of such sages and mages as Plato, Copernicus, Galileo, the cartographer Ortelius, “the Rosicrucian Brethren,” and other authorities. And he learns much more than he cares to know about Alethea’s scholar-adventurer (and thief?) father Sir Ambrose Plessington, sinister “art broker” Henry Monboddo, the ironic (hidden) meaning of the Latin motto Littera Scripta Manet (“the written word abides”), and enigmas surrounding the wreck of a German ship carrying “mysterious cargo” to London, and Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated exploratory voyage to Guiana. Ex-Libris wears its considerable learning lightly, and its climactic succession of surprises does not disappoint.
Readers who willingly lost themselves in Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost should know that King has written its entirely worthy successor.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-8027-3357-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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