The sex is powerful, the tone intelligent, the authorial aims high, the period almost too perfectly rendered (everyone eats...
Faulks (The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray, both 1999, etc.) seeks new ground by setting his latest in the US during the Nixon–JFK election campaign of 1960—with results that reveal his powerful command of story-drive but skirt closer than usual to the familiar and melodramatic.
After 11 years of marriage and two children, Britishers Charlie and Mary van der Linden look almost perfect from the outside: Charlie a brilliantly capable diplomat with the British Embassy in DC, Mary serving willingly and happily as his indefatigably attractive, intelligent, socially skilled hostess-wife. But that’s the outside. Charlie is drinking way—way—too much and has something faintly shady (or so the FBI thinks) from back in Dien Bien Phu days that may be resurfacing. And though Mary is far too well-trained to say so, sending the children to England for school (an austerity move) has left her rudderless and at times passionately lonely, not to mention that her mother, in London, is dying of cancer. Enter Frank Renzo, an American journalist who’ll be covering the national campaign if he, too, has at last fallen off the bottom of the FBI’s suspicious-list. At a boozy party at the van der Lindens’ in DC, so smitten is Frank with the attractive Mary that after leaving he pretends he’s shut his hand in a car door (he actually cut himself) just so he can come back for first aid and be around her longer. Soon enough, mutually passionate love ensues, Mary travels often to New York where she claims to be working on a book but sees Frank, and depressed Charlie gradually heads for a breakdown.
The sex is powerful, the tone intelligent, the authorial aims high, the period almost too perfectly rendered (everyone eats steak and eggs, nary a thought of cholesterol) —and yet, and yet: on this virgin American soil, the historical resonance and dimension usual for Faulks has for once eluded him.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50225-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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