Britain's battle against Napoleon continues, now moving into the 1813 Vitoria campaign in Spain—but this time out Major Richard Sharpe (Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, etc.) is more involved as an undercover agent than as a military leader. The mayhem begins when Major Pierre Ducos, Sharpe's arch-enemy, devises a scheme to win the war and destroy Sharpe in the process. The plot? France would sign a secret treaty with the Spanish king, breaking the Spain/UK alliance. But, to bring this off, Ducos needs help from both Spanish Inquisitor Father Hacha (evil) and Spanish guerrilla-chief El Matarife (a monster)—who require mucho money for their services. So, with an assist from Sharpe's old flame La Marquesa (a.k.a. the Golden Whore), Ducos arranges for her rich husband to challenge super-honorable Sharpe to a duel—resulting in the death of the Marques (his fortune going to Ducos) and murder charges against Sharpe. . . who is promptly convicted and hanged! But: could series-hero Sharpe really be dead? Of course not. Thanks to some last-minute gallows substitution, Sharpe is secretly alive—and, with a teenage Spanish sidekick, he sets off on an undercover-spy mission: find La Marquesa, learn why she helped to flame him, and figure out just what the scheme is all about. Sharpe tangles with the bloodthirsty Matarife; he rescues La Marquesa (half villainess/half heroine) from a convent; he's captured by the French; he struggles to preserve his honour, though sorely tempted otherwise. And finally, as Wellington's men march on Vitoria, Sharpe foils the scheme, chops up El Matarife (who has again abducted La Marquesa), and prepares to march with the triumphant Wellington into France itself. Vile villains, political derring-do d/a Dumas, and dollops of zesty gore: another inventive, active outing for the stalwart (if less than endearing) Major Sharpe.
Pub Date: March 1, 1985
ISBN: 014029435X
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1985
The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.
Brooks combines her penchant for historical fiction (Year of Wonders, 2001, etc.) with the literary-reinvention genre as she imagines the Civil War from the viewpoint of Little Women’s Mr. March (a stand-in for Bronson Alcott).
In 1861, John March, a Union chaplain, writes to his family from Virginia, where he finds himself at an estate he remembers from his much earlier life. He’d come there as a young peddler and become a guest of the master, Mr. Clement, whom he initially admired for his culture and love of books. Then Clement discovered that March, with help from the light-skinned, lovely, and surprisingly educated house slave Grace, was teaching a slave child to read. The seeds of abolitionism were planted as March watched his would-be mentor beat Grace with cold mercilessness. When March’s unit makes camp in the now ruined estate, he finds Grace still there, nursing Clement, who is revealed to be, gasp, her father. Although drawn to Grace, March is true to his wife Marmee, and the story flashes back to their life together in Concord. Friends of Emerson and Thoreau, the pair became active in the Underground Railroad and raised their four daughters in wealth until March lost all his money in a scheme of John Brown’s. Now in the war-torn South, March finds himself embroiled in another scheme doomed to financial failure when his superiors order him to minister to the “contraband”: freed slaves working as employees for a northerner who has leased a liberated cotton plantation. The morally gray complications of this endeavor are the novel’s greatest strength. After many setbacks, the crop comes in, but the new plantation-owner is killed by marauders and his “employees” taken back into slavery. March, deathly ill, ends up in a Washington, DC, hospital, where Marmee visits and meets Grace, now a nurse. Readers of Little Women know the ending.
The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.Pub Date: March 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03335-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Altogether bizarre—and pleasingly beguiling, if demanding. Not the book for readers new to Murakami but likely to satisfy...
Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, 2014, etc.) returns with a sprawling epic of art, dislocation, and secrets.
As usual with Murakami, the protagonist of his latest, a long and looping yarn, does not bear a name, at least one that we know. As usual, he is an artist at loose ends, here because his wife has decided to move on. And for good reason, for, as he confesses, he has never been able to tell her “that her eyes reminded me so much of my sister who’d died at twelve, and that that was the main reason I’d been attracted to her.” A girl of about the same age haunts these pages, one who is obsessed with the smallness of her breasts and worries that she will never grow to womanhood—and for good reason, too, since she’s happened into an otherworld that may remind some readers of the labyrinthine depths of Murakami’s 1Q84. Dejected artist meets disappeared girl in a hinterland populated by an elusive tech entrepreneur, an ancient painter, a mysterious pit, and a work of art whose figures come to life, one of them “a little old man no more than two feet tall” who “wore white garments from a bygone age and carried a tiny sword at his waist.” That figure, we learn, is the Commendatore of the title, a character from the Italian Renaissance translated into samurai-era Japan as an Idea, with a capital I, whose metaphorical status does not prevent him from coming to a bad end. The story requires its players to work their ways through mazes and moments of history that some would rather forget—including, here, the destruction of Nanjing during World War II. Art, ideas, and history are one thing, but impregnation via metempsychosis is quite another; even by Murakami’s standards, that part of this constantly challenging storyline requires heroic suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part.
Altogether bizarre—and pleasingly beguiling, if demanding. Not the book for readers new to Murakami but likely to satisfy longtime fans.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52004-7
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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