A melodrama of the waning British Empire.
A young English wife becomes the mistress of a tea plantation in Ceylon and is quickly confronted with upheavals—racial, social, and domestic—in Jefferies’ U.S. debut.
Gwen, daughter of a landed Gloucestershire family, marries widower Laurence Hooper, descended from Ceylon’s original English settlers. Upon setting up housekeeping on the vast Hooper tea plantation, Gwen is puzzled by Laurence’s intermittent coldness toward her. Unable to get any information out of the family servants, not even longtime retainer and ayah Naveena, Gwen suspects that Laurence may be succumbing to the blandishments, financial and otherwise, of New York sophisticate Christina, a Wall Street trader. Another thorn is Verity, Laurence’s clingy sister, who refuses to get married while insisting that Laurence pay her an allowance. In a secluded grotto, Gwen discovers the grave of Laurence’s young son, Thomas, his child by his first wife, Caroline, and Laurence is circumspect about how Thomas died—as he is about the nature of Caroline’s final illness. At a planters’ soiree, Gwen spies Laurence dancing with Christina and feigns indifference by getting sloshed. Unable to recall what happened after being carried upstairs and put to bed by Savi Ravasinghe, a charming Sinhalese society portraitist, Gwen assumes the worse. Laurence and she having ironed out their conjugal wrinkles, she becomes pregnant, and, while Laurence is away, she gives birth to twins—a white boy and a girl clearly of mixed race. Naveena names the girl Liyoni and finds a family to raise her. Tormented by the loss of her daughter, secrets kept from and by Laurence, and revulsion for Savi, Gwen watches the painter flirt with every woman in sight and eventually become the toast of New York. Muddle the above with the Wall Street crash, mysterious thefts, and a couple of native uprisings, and we soon realize that this plot has painted itself into a corner from which only the unlikeliest of coincidences can extract it.
A melodrama of the waning British Empire.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49597-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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