Kick off your shoes, lean back in your favorite chair—and make sure your thinking cap stays securely in place. The Music of...
A growing sense of intellectual excitement pervades this richly imagined and densely plotted debut, a worthy companion to such successful literary historical fiction as Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost and Matthew G. Kneale’s English Passengers.
It’s set in London in 1795, a time when England fears invasion by the armies of France’s newly empowered Republican government. Accordingly, Home Office clerk Jonathan Absey is assigned the task of seeking out French spies who may be smuggling vital military information back across the Channel. But that duty is interrupted by Absey’s obsessive quest for the uncaught killer of his 18-year-old daughter—whose fate is echoed in a series of recent murders of young street prostitutes. Absey forcibly enlists the aid of his guilt-ridden half-brother Alexander Wilmot, a homosexual choirmaster and amateur astronomer, when incriminating evidence points to the “Company of Titius,” a group of exiled French Royalists, themselves astronomers, and rumored to be investigating the possibility of a missing planet hidden somewhere in our solar system. Redfern uses this promising metaphor skillfully, introducing one vivid, suspicious character after another: emotionally deranged (and quite possibly psychotic) Guy de Montpellier and his dangerously beautiful sister Auguste; Pierre Raultier, the physician who betrays his own ideals to serve the Montpelliers; Auguste’s “silent satyr” and lover, mysteriously mute William Carline; secretive “spectacle-maker” Perceval Oates; young whore Rose Brennan, who may know more than she’s telling—and numerous other members of the un-landed aristocracy, the rival nations’ governments, and the Company of Titius. The story changes directions deftly when Absey comes to suspect that coded messages are being sent to France under the cover of an elaborate “table of planetary distances,” and a sequence of melodramatic climactic intrigues is set in motion. Only Redfern’s tendency to overexplain (perhaps understandable: the novel is loaded with specific information) and her rather heavy hand with expository detail interrupt the narrative’s breathless pace and delicious complexity.
Kick off your shoes, lean back in your favorite chair—and make sure your thinking cap stays securely in place. The Music of the Spheres demands an attentive ear, even as its multiple harmonies enchant and satisfy the senses.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14763-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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