It’s as difficult to put this novel down as it is to overestimate Mitchell’s virtually unparalleled mastery of dramatic...
Another Booker Prize nomination is likely to greet this ambitious and fascinating fifth novel—a full-dress historical, and then some—from the prodigally gifted British author (Black Swan Green, 2006, etc.).
In yet another departure from the postmodern Pynchonian intricacy of his earlier fiction, this is the story of a devout young Dutch Calvinist (the eponymous Jacob) sent in 1799 to Japan, where the Dutch East India Company, aka the VOC, had opened trade routes more than two centuries earlier. But now the Company is threatened by the envious British Empire, which seeks to appropriate the Far East’s rich commercial opportunities. Jacob’s purpose is to acquire sufficient wealth and experience to earn the hand of his fiancée Anna. But his mission is to serve as a ship’s clerk while simultaneously investigating charges of corruption against the Company’s powerful Chief Resident. When a scandal involving the seizure of the much-desired commodity of copper is manipulated to implicate Jacob, he is posted to the artificially constructed island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, becoming a de facto prisoner of an insular little world of rigorously patterned and controlled cultural—and commercial—rituals. Meanwhile, the story of Aibagawa Orita, a facially disfigured (hence unmarriageable) midwife authorized to study with the Company’s doctor (the saturnine Marinus, a kind of Pangloss to Jacob’s earnest Candide), punished for having aspired beyond her station, and the moving story of her planned escape from servitude and reunion with the beloved (Uzaeman) forbidden to marry her (which contains deft echoes of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Ondaatje’s The English Patient), mocks, as it exalts, Jacob’s concealed love for this extraordinary woman. The story climaxes as British forces challenge the Dutch hold on the East’s riches, and Jacob’s long ordeal hurtles toward its conclusion.
It’s as difficult to put this novel down as it is to overestimate Mitchell’s virtually unparalleled mastery of dramatic construction, illuminating characterizations and insight into historical conflict and change. Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money.Pub Date: June 29, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6545-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
He’s Ivo Maltravers, the proud English Duke of Wareham, currency poor but heritage wealthy; and she’s Cora Cash, if not...
A shrewd, spirited historical romance with flavors of Edith Wharton, Daphne du Maurier, Jane Austen, Upstairs, Downstairs and a dash of People magazine that charts a bumpy marriage of New World money and Old World tradition.
He’s Ivo Maltravers, the proud English Duke of Wareham, currency poor but heritage wealthy; and she’s Cora Cash, if not prejudiced then certainly a forthright modern girl who may be the richest American heiress of the late-Victorian era. Their engagement swiftly follows a hunting accident in England, and details of the marriage, such as her gold-and-diamond-trimmed corset and 90-couture-gown trousseau, fill the gossip magazines of the day. But once installed at Lulworth, Ivo’s vast country estate, Cora—like the heroine of Rebecca at Manderley—begins to feel a little out of her depth. The English are slippery, not least Ivo’s mother, the Double Duchess, and Ivo himself seems to be involved with the beautiful blond wife of another nobleman. British TV producer Goodwin’s debut, a knowing, judicious blend of Gilded Age extravagance, below-stairs perspective, delivered via Cora’s black maid, and sophisticated social tableaux, offers reader satisfaction. The marriage suffers its threats, and misunderstandings but a finale overlooking the crashing waves of a Dorset beach resolves matters with characteristic passion and maturity.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65865-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.
After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways (including a short story written in Tweets), Pulitzer Prize winner Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel.
It shouldn’t really be surprising, since even Egan’s most experimental work has been rich in characters and firmly grounded in sharp observation of the society around them. Here, she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1673-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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