An often entertaining novel of particular interest to fans of military epics and historical political intrigues.
In this third installment of Schrader’s (Defender of Jerusalem, 2015, etc.) series of historical novels on the life of crusader Balian d’Ibelin, the Christian and Islamic worlds vie for control of the Holy Land during the Third Crusade.
As the story begins, Jerusalem has fallen to Salah ad-Din Yusuf, sultan of Egypt and Damascus. Through clever negotiation, Balian secures the citizens’ lives, as well as the release of anyone able to pay a ransom; still, many thousands of poor people get sold into slavery, a fact that haunts Balian through the rest of the novel. After the death of Jerusalem’s Queen Sibylla, many question the idea that the usurper, King Guy de Lusignan—characterized as being “despised for leading the Christian army to an unnecessary defeat and losing the entire Kingdom as a result”—has the right to rule. Against a backdrop of flailing military campaigns to retake lost cities, a complicated scheme unfolds to put the queen’s sister, Balian’s stepdaughter, Isabella, on the throne after she repudiates her marriage to the ineffectual Humphrey de Toron and marries the more ambitious Conrad de Montferrat. The rift between the two pretenders to the throne is further complicated by the arrival of the kings of France and England, who each back a different claimant. But the presence of the larger-than-life King Richard the Lionheart, who ‘had seemed invincible—indeed, immortal,’ reinvigorates the Christian fighting forces, leading the armies to improbable victories. Overall, the novel’s prose is fluid and engaging, and Schrader presents the dialogue in clear, generally formal, modern language. However, this style may frustrate sticklers who are more concerned with authenticity than accessibility; for example, King Richard uses contemporary idiom when commenting on Guy de Lusignan’s chances of being chosen king: “He doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.” The volume of characters in the book can be daunting, especially as many take turns providing their own points of view. When clearly signaled, these shifts can offer engaging glimpses into the world of the story, but when they happen multiple times in the span of only a few pages, it can become confusing.
An often entertaining novel of particular interest to fans of military epics and historical political intrigues.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62787-397-0
Page Count: 514
Publisher: Wheatmark
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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