At his best when he artfully blends comedy and pathos (Deaf Sentence, 2008, etc.), Lodge returns to the fictional biography genre that didn’t serve him particularly well in Author, Author (2004).
At least, unlike Henry James (the earlier novel’s protagonist), H.G. Wells had an eventful life rife with political controversies and a tangled variety of love affairs, as well as bestselling books ranging from early sci-fi classics such as The War of the Worlds to popular nonfiction like The Outline of History. The books are conscientiously covered; indeed, the novel reminds us just how influential and famous Wells was from the 1890s through World War I. But his romantic life is the main focus here, as the writer looks back from the vantage point of 1944 on his tumultuous relations with a parade of independent young women who worshipped him as a titillating socialist/feminist bad boy. They offered sexual excitement while wife Jane provided domestic comforts at home. His straitlaced comrades at the Fabian Society were appalled by Wells’ open espousal of free love—especially in the several cases where their daughters took him up on it—and resistant to his desire to make the Society more populist and aggressive. He eventually parted ways with the Fabians, just as he did with his youthful lovers, though his turbulent relationship with Rebecca West lasted the longest and produced an understandably neurotic son. The character sketches are sharp, particularly of West and of fellow Fabians George Bernard Shaw and Edith Bland (better known as children’s novelist E. Nesbit), and Wells’ uneasy friendship with Henry James is hilariously expressed in fulsomely insincere letters on both sides. (Its rupture after Wells publishes a cruel satire of James’ baroque style is surprisingly moving.) Yet Lodge’s well-written book doesn’t offer any unusual insights that justify making this straightforward narrative of Wells’ most prominent and productive years a novel rather than a biography. Readable but ultimately rather pointless.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02298-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
IN THE NEWS
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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