Wise and melancholy and, eventually, very tense.
The uneasy relationship of three British schoolmates haunts their adult lives during the first years of Francisco Franco’s dark Spanish dictatorship in a novel from the author of the excellent Matthew Shardlake Tudor detective stories (Sovereign, 2007, etc.).
Shell-shocked and deafened, Lt. Harry Brett was evacuated from Dunkirk moments after the man next to him was blown to pieces. Unable to return immediately to battle, he reluctantly accepts an undercover assignment to Spain, where he is to look up his public-school classmate Sandy Forsyth to see whether Sandy might be recruited as an intelligence source. Sandy was not really Harry’s friend at Rookwood. He wasn’t anyone’s friend. The rebellious son of an Anglican bishop, Sandy was cynical and a bully, but Harry was as close to a friend as he had before getting kicked out for cruelty to a faculty member. Now he has turned up in Madrid, a sleek and prospering businessman, cutting deals with the Falangists and Monarchists who recently ousted the Republicans. It won’t be Harry’s first trip to Spain. He was there once before to see Bernie Piper, Harry’s best friend from school and Sandy’s arch enemy. To the great disappointment of his working-class parents, Bernie’s scholarship to Rookwood gave him a deep distaste for the ruling class they hoped he would join, and he eventually turned to communism and joined the International Brigade defending Republican Spain against the Nationalists. When Harry, undercover as an embassy translator, reaches Madrid, he finds Sandy in possession of Barbara, a Red Cross nurse who loved Bernie before his disappearance and presumed death in the civil war. Harry takes up with the couple, worming his awkward way into Sandy’s confidence. As Harry learns details of Sandy’s sleazy high-level dealings, Barbara learns that Bernie is not dead. He’s a secret government prisoner, and she immediately begins to plot his escape as Harry at last finds a little love.
Wise and melancholy and, eventually, very tense.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01848-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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