A rousing good read, nevertheless, and a welcome addition to a quite considerable (and really rather underrated) body of...
The legend of Roderick the Beardless—the ninth-century hero who was in fact a heroine—is given fictional form in Holland’s lively and entertaining 23rd novel.
Protagonist Ragny, daughter of Spain’s Queen Ingunn, flees following her mother’s death from the heavy-breathing clutches of Ingunn’s oafish consort Markold the Grim. Donning male garb and adopting the name Roderick, Ragny and her companion-in-arms Seffrid (Markold’s former “sergeant”) journey to the neighboring kingdom of Francia (ruled by Charlemagne’s grandson, the “slipshod little King” Charles), and help defend it from marauding “Northmen.” Having proven “himself” a mighty warrior, Roderick is given the hand of the king’s unwilling daughter Alpaida—and the inevitable revelation of Ragny’s true identity sends her to prison and a sentence of trial by fire to determine whether she is—as the suggestible Charles fears—a shape-shifting witch. The story’s resolution, accomplished through the agency of what may indeed be supernatural means, fittingly crowns Ragny’s adventures, and ends—as any legend worth its salt must—with a hard-won restoration of order. Holland (An Ordinary Woman, 1999, etc.) is a real master of historical fiction. She writes crisp, swift sentences, offers intensely sensory visualizations (e.g., “The trail began to drop away under them, so that his horse leaned back and slid stiff-legged with each step on the hard rock”), constructs vivid action scenes, and judiciously mingles her characters’ introspective moments with the surrounding drama—stumbling only by employing King Charles reminiscences a bit too overtly as exposition, and with occasionally supercharged rhetoric (as when Ragny and Leovild, the courageous knight who wins her, meet in a climactic embrace: “Her mouth was like the rose, and he the bee”).
A rousing good read, nevertheless, and a welcome addition to a quite considerable (and really rather underrated) body of work.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-86890-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
A first novel about the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln, riveting in its depiction of time and place but less convincing in its characterizations. Robertson, the author of a well-received biography of the longtime political powerbroker James F. Byrnes (Sly and Able, 1994), knows how to do research. His portrait of wartime Washington in the last days of the Civil War is filled with vivid particulars, and his rendering of the hustling spirit of the town, with almost everyone angling for money or power, seems just right. The narrator who describes the scene, though, is more problematic. John Surratt is an old man as the novel begins, looking back over the awful events of his youth, at their heart his involvement with the charming, manic actor John Wilkes Booth. Surratt was in fact the only figure believed to be closely associated with Booth's plot who was never imprisoned. Fleeing the country after Lincoln's death, he was caught and returned in 1867 but found not guilty after a turbulent trial, while his own mother was among those tried and executed in the aftermath of Booth's crime. What's jarring here is that Robertson, who starts out seeming to want to plumb the plot and Booth's enigmatic character, ends up devoting much of his story to a defense of Surratt's character, presenting him as an innocent manipulated by a variety of cunning figures, including not only Booth but Sarah Slater, a young actress who may have been a Confederate spy, and the self-styled super-spy for the Union, Allan Pinkerton. Lost in all of this motion is any real sense of Booth's character or motives, or any feeling for the outcasts who became his followers. The backgrounds against which the action is played out are grimly realistic, many individual scenes have power and originality, but the characters themselves remain flat, gaudy, rather melodramatic. Lively, colorful, but finally an uncomfortable mix of fact and fancy. (Illustrated with 12 b&w period photographs)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48706-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
Noted Hungarian writer Esterh†zy (Helping Verbs of the Heart, 1990) pays homage to Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal in a deceptively whimsical novel that addresses deadly serious questions with stylistic panache and intellectual verve. While Anna, mother of three and wife of a failed avant-garde Hungarian writer, composes imaginary letters to the noted Hrabal, two angels sitting in a parked car keep watch outside her house. Their surveillance, though it recalls the behavior of the former communist regime, has a more benign intent: They have been sent by God to prevent Anna from aborting her fourth pregnancy. The questions of abortion, man's relation to God, and life under the communists provide underlying gravitas to a tale that at times is almost giddily playful. In her correspondence with Hrabal, Anna recalls her childhood, the communist takeover of Hungary, and the 1956 uprising and its aftermath, as well as her first meeting with her future husband, her difficult relationship with her mother, and the contrasting warm affection she bore her mother-in-law. In her final letter, she confesses that she no longer loves her husband and that, overwhelmed by her responsibilities, she understands at last, ``there is no one to take care of me, it's me, taking care of them all.'' Anna also likes to sing the blues, and the novel pays affectionate tribute to that genre's immortal songs and artists. Even God, musically inept despite saxophone lessons from the late Charlie Parker, in desperation picks up Parker's sax to prevent Anna from having the abortion: ``He bit the mouthpiece and blew into the tube, he knew right away it was no good, like blowing his nose, hopelessly bad, not a little or a lot, but fundamentally.'' More a brilliant riff on meaning and music than a sustained story, but there's still much to admire—and enjoy.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-8101-1192-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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