Absolutely wonderful. Grateful thanks, too, to Carroll & Graf, which has stepped in where many “major” publishers have...
The Grand Cham of 18th-century English letters is the primary subject of Bainbridge’s majestically deft new novel: the best yet in her series of dazzling historical reconstructions of British history (Master Georgie, 1998, etc.).
James Boswell’s great Life gave us the partial lowdown on scholar-lexicographer Samuel Johnson’s tenure as permanent honored guest of the family of prosperous Southwark brewmaster Henry Thrale—and the Great Man’s courtly friendship with his host’s charming wife Hester, a self-made bluestocking and the mistress of an ineffably fashionable salon that also embraced eminences like author Oliver Goldsmith and actor David Garrick. Bainbridge’s conceit is that Johnson—a middle-aged widower (bereft of his much older wife) whose teeming brain waged continual warfare with his “lower’ faculties—was both sustained and tormented by the sophisticated mixed signals emitted by the intellectually flirtatious matron, a fascination mirrored in his avuncular friendship with the Thrales’ precociously gifted eldest daughter, the eponymous “Queeney.” The latter’s perspective on her mercurial parent’s outwardly platonic relationships is conveyed in letters in which Queeney replies to a female acquaintance’s importunate queries, some 20 years following Johnson’s domination of her mother’s circle. Testimony from several other characters (many servants) is skillfully integrated into the swiftly moving narrative, and Bainbridge also offers brief glimpses of Johnson’s own tempestuous demeanor, dictated by his vulnerability to gout, depression, sudden and impulsive emotional outbursts, and the occasional “loathsome descent into sensuality.” The tale is told with its author’s customary masterly economy, graced by Bainbridge’s tone-perfect imitations of period speech (even illiterate nursemaids speak—quite believably—like Jane Austen characters) and genius for suggestive imagery (“a glimpse of gray river beneath a rind of weeping sky”).
Absolutely wonderful. Grateful thanks, too, to Carroll & Graf, which has stepped in where many “major” publishers have faltered, bringing us the otherwise neglected recent work of British masters like the late Anthony Burgess and the irresistible, indispensable Beryl Bainbridge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0773-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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