Nonetheless, Phillips’s formidable research and witty prose make this one well worth your time. He’s quite possibly a major...
A secretive archaeologist’s obsession with an obscure Egyptian king uncovers several concealed histories—in Phillips’s clever, labyrinthine successor to his prizewinning debut (Prague, 2002).
In the fuller of its twin narratives, Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush describes (via his journals and correspondence) his quest for the tomb of Atum-hadu, a monarch of the doomed XIIIth Theban dynasty—financed by American clothing store mogul C.C. Finneran. Trilipush is a grand mal eccentric and megalomaniac, whose translations of Atum-hadu’s erotic “admonitions” (published as Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt) have scandalized and irked reputable fellow scholars. Is Trilipush a charlatan? That’s the opinion of retired Australian private detective Harold Ferrell, who, as a nursing home patient in 1954, pens garrulous letters to the nephew of C.C.’s formerly opium-addicted partygirl daughter Margaret, to whom Trilipush had become engaged (though not for her father’s wealth, as Trilipush’s letters fervently proclaim). The two stories are connected by Ferrell’s investigation of the disappearance of young Aussie Egyptophile Paul Caldwell in the very year (1922) and place where and when Trilipush was investigating Atum-hadu’s (possibly apocryphal) history as emblematic of the classic “Tomb Paradox”: attempting to achieve immortality by concealing all evidence that one has ever lived. This is a suave, elegant novel, replete with sinuously composed sentences and delicious wordplay (“brogue” as a verb; “claustrophilia” to describe Trilipush’s pyramidal burrowings, etc.); it’s reminiscent of both Angus Wilson’s brilliant comic novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and Vladimir Nabokov’s postmodernist masterpiece Pale Fire (Phillips plants a half-buried allusion to the latter late in the book). Alas, it’s also intermittently labored and redundant. The mysteries of Trilipush’s veracity and sexual orientation are endlessly worried, as is his hubristic rivalry with historical Egyptologist Howard Carter (discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamen).
Nonetheless, Phillips’s formidable research and witty prose make this one well worth your time. He’s quite possibly a major novelist in the making.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6250-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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