Images here—the girls’ chalk drawings on blackout curtains, the flowers in the secret garden—can be breathtaking, but such...
A slight, chiseled story about a lonely horticulturalist who plants a garden for the Women’s Land Army during WWII.
Following Charlotte Brontë’s lead in Humphreys’s last novel (Afterimage, 2001), Virginia Woolf now takes the role of literary touchstone. Gwen Davis keeps writing letters she doesn’t mail to Woolf, whose lonely figure she once followed down a London street. At 35, Gwen is a sad case of isolation who likes to sleep under a heavy open book to feel embraced. Having experienced minimal human affection, she loves London with an almost physical passion. Unable to bear its destruction under the bombing, she volunteers to plant potatoes for the war effort at an estate in Devon with a band of young recruits in the Land Army. She leaves the city and her job studying parsnips at the Royal Horticultural Society on the same day that Virginia Woolf’s suicide is discovered. Although she desperately wants to bond with her new community, once in Devon she behaves at first like a stereotypical spinster, overly rigid and controlling; her inability to bridge the gap between her yearning and her behavior can be heartbreaking. In particular, she turns an unnecessarily prim eye on the fraternization taking place between the girls and a battalion of Canadian soldiers also billeted on the estate. Then she finds and begins to tend a secret abandoned garden, the Garden of Longing. Gradually, Gwen relaxes within herself and makes her first real friend, the intense, anorexic (though the word is never used) Jane, whose fighter pilot fiancé is missing and who reads To the Lighthouse aloud to a lonely soldier while Gwen listens at the door. Gwen also finds herself attracted to the battalion’s handsome, quietly alcoholic Captain, who recites poetry and has suffered a deep loss of his own.
Images here—the girls’ chalk drawings on blackout curtains, the flowers in the secret garden—can be breathtaking, but such abundant literary artifice keeps the reader at bay.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-05183-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
