Historically accurate and huge fun. Vintage Cornwell.
Continuing the series that began with The Archer’s Tale (2001), adventure master Cornwell throws his lusty young hero Thomas of Hookton up against both the French and the Inquisition.
Opening with a fine small battle on the Scottish border, Cornwell continues his historically based, wildly entertaining trek through the Hundred Years War, a tale that hangs on the adventures of a superb English bowman at a time when English longbows pretty much ruled the battlefield. Thomas, last seen at the battle of Crecy, has trudged up north with orders from Edward Plantagenet to see a monk in Durham about a legend. The legend is The Grail, and Thomas is involved because his priestly father Ralph de Vexille, a French fugitive, left him a multilingual diary full of references to the sacred vessel. The Vexilles believed they had possession of the cup, and the diary may lead to its recovery. Oxford dropout Thomas can read his father’s Latin and a bit of the Greek, but the Hebrew’s got him stumped. Marching with the lad are his pregnant sweetheart and a kindly monk, both doomed to die at the hands of the divinely sinister Dominican inquisitor Bernard de Taillebourg, who, with his dark and moody servant Guy de Trexille (Thomas’s psychotic cousin), lusts after the diary. Before Thomas can get his answers he’s roped into an English skirmish with raiding Scots. Encouraged by their French allies, the savage northerners have massed in huge numbers, but their drums and battle-axes are no match for the handful of archers Tom joins. Thomas makes an enemy of a nasty bankrupt knight and poor Eleanor falls victim to the sadistic de Taillebourg, but Thomas survives to continue his quest for the grail accompanied by cheerful prisoner Robbie Douglas. Their travels, always just a few steps ahead of the damned Dominican and the jealous Sir Geoffrey, take them to Brittany, scene of earlier romance, where the English have a tenuous toehold and where de Taillebourg has equally perfidious allies. There will be torture, siege, and treachery.
Historically accurate and huge fun. Vintage Cornwell.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621080-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.
Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).
In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4366-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.
After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways (including a short story written in Tweets), Pulitzer Prize winner Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel.
It shouldn’t really be surprising, since even Egan’s most experimental work has been rich in characters and firmly grounded in sharp observation of the society around them. Here, she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1673-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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