Reluctant British naval officer Alan Lewrie (The Gun Ketch, 1993, etc.) assists in the defense of Toulon at the beginning of England's war with revolutionary France. The year is 1793, and our once-rakehell hero is now a domesticated half-pay lieutenant, seven years married, with three children and a farm that he is just learning to manage, not liking it any more than he does most of his neighbors. When war is declared, Alan returns to active service as first lieutenant on a new frigate, the HMS Cockerel, commanded by flogging-prone Captain Braxton with his son for a second lieutenant and two other brutal relatives as midshipmen. Alan soldiers on, however, rediscovering that he is ``damn good at this,'' and soon finds himself in Naples, standing in for the malaria-stricken captain. In good Lewrie style, he savors Italian food and the favors of Lady Emma Hamilton (before she meets Nelson). Then the action shifts to Toulon, which has been surrendered by loyalist French. Alan has been seconded to its defense forces by Braxton as a means of advancing his son. Well fortified as it is, the city cannot be held without reinforcements. After being briefly captured by a Colonel Bonaparte, Alan is assigned to use a surrendered French vessel to ferry loyalist civilians to Gibraltar, which he does with distinction during a climactic sea battle. Naturally, while in Toulon, he takes pity on pauvre Phoebe, bedmate to one of his fallen shipmates, a development that will surely lead to further complications. Lambdin continues to plunk Alan Lewrie down in the midst of interesting times with humor and plenty of authentic detail. Great fun for the amateur military historianwith the whole of the Napoleonic Wars still to come.
Pub Date: July 25, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-446-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
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