Vivid, layered, and provocative period drama about the trade-offs of backing tradition versus letting go.
Twice longlisted for the Orange Prize for stories set in distant eras, Clark (The Great Stink, 2005; Savage Lands, 2010, etc.) takes on the dicey task of revitalizing Edwardian aristocrats grappling with the heir loss and social change ushered in by World War I.
The ancestral wick of Sir Aubry Melville and his wife— Eleanor to her extramarital companions—coils to ash with the death of their only son, Theo, killed in France before his Christmas letter arrives. Missing her golden boy, Eleanor consorts with spiritualists. “I’m not sure hush is what Eleanor’s after,” her mouthy youngest child, Jessica, snipes to a condolence caller. “She prefers the dead jabbering 19 to the dozen.” Ignored (as always) by their mother, and with presentation at court and weekend gaiety no longer an option—“Every man you might have married is already dead”—Theo’s teenage sisters, Phyllis and Jessica (call them Sense and Sensibility), plot their pacts with the new normal: the elder girl ducks her duty to reproduce by volunteering at a convalescent hospital, then pursues a degree in archaeology, leaving the younger trapped with their table-rocking mother and a father preoccupied by the future of Ellinghurst, the crumbling pile which by tradition must pass to males with the Melville surname. In doubt of ever being allowed to start her own life, 19-year-old Jessica bolts and cadges a job in London as the agony aunt columnist for a new women’s magazine. Clark reminds us that one of the pleasures of reading historical fiction is meeting characters whose thoughts are their own but also mirror the wrongdoings and legacies of their time. We commiserate with Jessica for having to jolly older men, only because they vastly outnumber the age-appropriate ones. She does her best to torment her mother’s godson, Oskar Grunewald, the most insightful of their childhood set. A math prodigy and hopeless stick-in-the-mud (by Jessica’s estimate, though not her sister’s), Oskar faces his own wartime challenge—his German heritage could scrub his chance of working with his scientific idol at Cambridge. Ironically, his loyalty to the Melvilles poses a greater threat to his career.
Vivid, layered, and provocative period drama about the trade-offs of backing tradition versus letting go.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-12999-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes...
The newest novel by Moyes (Me Before You, 2012, etc.) shares its title with a fictional painting that serves as catalyst in linking two love stories, one set in occupied France during World War I, the other in 21st-century London.
In a French village in 1916, Sophie is helping the family while her husband, Édouard, an artist who studied with Matisse, is off fighting. Sophie’s pluck in standing up to the new German kommandant in the village draws his interest. An art lover, he also notices Édouard's portrait of Sophie, which captures her essence (and the kommandant's adoration). Arranging to dine regularly at Sophie’s inn with his men, he begins a cat-and-mouse courtship. She resists. But learning that Édouard is being held in a particularly harsh “reprisal” camp, she must decide what she will sacrifice for Édouard’s freedom. The rich portrayals of Sophie, her family and neighbors hauntingly capture wartime’s gray morality. Cut to 2006 and a different moral puzzle. Thirty-two-year-old widow Liv has been struggling financially and emotionally since her husband David’s sudden death. She meets Paul in a bar after her purse is stolen. The divorced father is the first man she’s been drawn to since she was widowed. They spend a glorious night together, but after noticing Édouard's portrait of Sophie on Liv’s wall, he rushes away with no explanation. In fact, Paul is as smitten as Liv, but his career is finding and returning stolen art to the rightful owners. Usually the artwork was confiscated by Germans during World War II, not WWI, but Édouard's descendants recently hired him to find this very painting. Liv is not about to part with it; David bought it on their honeymoon because the portrait reminded him of Liv. In love, Liv and Paul soon find themselves on opposite sides of a legal battle.
While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes it impossible not to care about her heroines.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02661-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0451225244
Page Count: 973
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
BOOK TO SCREEN
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