The author’s love of 19th-century detail almost buries what should be a vivid adventure tale. Like the wines his characters...
The 19th-century adventures of Captain Matthew Hervey continue as our dashing hero, on a spying mission to India, tangles with bloodthirsty Pindaree raiders, conniving agents of the British East India company, a righteous rajah, and a wild, crashing boar.
Introduced in A Close Run Thing (1999) as a land-based rendition of Patrick O’Brian’s British seafaring Aubrey-Maturin series, Mallinson’s Hervey is a handsome, veddy British cavalry officer in his early 20s whose solid education, gift with languages, and sword-flashing fearlessness atop his faithful steed Jessye, is offset only by a youthful clumsiness: in an early episode here, Hervey knocks himself out when he charges valiantly into a French building and bangs his head on a ceiling beam. He is appropriately timid with women (an aristocratic English lass awaits his return) and also has a healthy conscience: it depresses him to see poor peasants brutally disemboweled, or brave soldiers tortured and mutilated because they happened to be on the losing side. Now, having been made aide-to-camp to the Duke of Wellington after running a crucial mission at Waterloo, Hervey is sent to India to observe the famed Bengal lancers, with instructions to spy on operations of the British East India Company and to destroy evidence of the Duke’s ownership of some politically incorrect income-producing estates. The India Hervey encounters is a dangerously exotic refuge for numerous English misfits seeking to plunder and pleasure their way across the subcontinent. Like the elephant that Hervey rescues from quicksand (thereby endearing himself to the wily Rajah of Chintal), Mallinson mires his hero in discursive mealtime dialogue about cultural and military tedium, then pulls him out at the last minute to hunt boar or help the rajah dispose of his enemies. Action scenes, when they arrive, are expertly detailed, with Mallinson describing battlefield tactics and military uniforms down to the button.
The author’s love of 19th-century detail almost buries what should be a vivid adventure tale. Like the wines his characters so frequently quaff, though, this series will improve with age.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-11134-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
