Acclaimed British novelist Mantel (An Experiment in Love, 1996, etc.; see below) offers a provocative take on men and women of goodwill side-swiped by unsuspected evil and betrayal in places as far apart as Botswana and England. The story, moving between the past and recent present, is a cautionary, compassionate tale of a model family almost destroyed by its secrets. At the start, Ralph Eldred has just learned that sister Emma, a doctor, has had a longtime affair with the married and recently deceased Felix. Ralph, whose life has been spent helping ``sad cases and good souls,'' is shaken by this ``failure of self-knowledge.'' As a young man, his wealthy and devout father forced him to give up his plans to study geology and to work instead at the inner-city mission. When offered a posting to South Africa, Ralph accepted because it would take him far away from his father. He marries Anna, as principled as he, and they settle into mission life. It's now the early 1960s, apartheid's apogee, and the two routinely confront police brutality and corruption. They become activists, eventually find themselves imprisoned, and then, released from jail, accept a remote posting in Botswana, where Anna gives birth to the twins Kit and Matthew. Later, a malevolent servant stabs Ralph and abducts the twins. Only Kit is found. Back in England, Ralph and Anna have more children but never tell them about the lost baby. Kit, however, now a college graduate, is troubled by dreams of Africa; Anna, still heartsore and angry over losing her child, feels alienated from Ralph; son Julian is adrift, and Ralph himself finds his charity work meaningless. He himself now slips into an affair, discovery of which finally provides a necessary catharsis. Emotions are vented, secrets revealed, and the family's love and faith are found to be stronger than suspected. A subtle exploration in vividly detailed settings of the complex workings of the hearts of well-intentioned people. Intelligent and moving.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-5205-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
IN THE NEWS
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.
A Christian woman and a Jewish man fall in love in medieval France.
In 1088, a Christian girl of Norman descent falls in love with the son of a rabbi. They run away together, to disastrous effect: Her father sends knights after them, and though they flee to a small southern village where they spend a few happy years, their budding family is soon decimated by a violent wave of First Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The girl, whose name becomes Hamoutal when she converts to Judaism, winds up roaming the world. Hertmans’ (War and Turpentine, 2016, etc.) latest novel is based on a true story: The Cairo Genizah, a trove of medieval manuscripts preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, contained an account of Hamoutal’s plight. Hamoutal makes up about half of Hertmans’ novel; the other half is consumed by Hertmans’ own interest in her story. Whenever he can, he follows her journey: from Rouen, where she grew up, to Monieux, where she and David Todros—her Jewish husband—made a brief life for themselves, and all the way to Cairo, and back. “Knowing her life story and its tragic end,” Hertmans writes, “I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead.” The book has a quiet intimacy to it, and in his descriptions of landscape and travel, Hertmans’ prose is frequently lovely. In Narbonne, where David’s family lived, Hertmans describes “the cool of the paving stones in the late morning, the sound of doves’ wings flapping in the immaculate air.” But despite the drama of Hamoutal’s story, there is a static quality to the book, particularly in the sections where Hertmans describes his own travels. It’s an odd contradiction: Hertmans himself moves quickly through the world, but his book doesn’t quite move quickly enough.
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4708-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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