With a sweeping bow to Virginia Woolf, McEwan combines insight, penetrating historical understanding, and sure-handed...
McEwan’s latest, both powerful and equisite, considers the making of a writer, the dangers and rewards of imagination, and the juncture between innocence and awareness, all set against the late afternoon of an England soon to disappear.
In the first, longest, and most compelling of four parts, McEwan (the Booker-winning Amsterdam, 1998) captures the inner lives of three characters in a moment in 1935: upper-class 13-year-old Briony Tallis; her 18-year-old sister, Cecilia; and Robbie Turner, son of the family’s charlady, whose Cambridge education has been subsidized by their father. Briony is a penetrating look at the nascent artist, vain and inspired, her imagination seizing on everything that comes her way to create stories, numinous but still childish. She witnesses an angry, erotic encounter between her sister and Robbie, sees an improper note, and later finds them hungrily coupling; misunderstanding all of it, when a visiting cousin is sexually assaulted, Briony falsely brings blame to bear on Robbie, setting the course for all their lives. A few years later, we see a wounded and feverish Robbie stumbling across the French countryside in retreat with the rest of the British forces at Dunkirk, while in London Briony and Cecilia, long estranged, have joined the regiment of nurses who treat broken men back from war. At 18, Briony understands and regrets her crime: it is the touchstone event of her life, and she yearns for atonement. Seeking out Cecilia, she inconclusively confronts her and a war-scarred Robbie. In an epilogue, we meet Briony a final time as a 77-year-old novelist facing oblivion, whose confessions reframe everything we’ve read.
With a sweeping bow to Virginia Woolf, McEwan combines insight, penetrating historical understanding, and sure-handed storytelling despite a conclusion that borrows from early postmodern narrative trickery. Masterful.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50395-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement...
The founding of Rome and the maturation of a hero who has greatness thrust upon him are the subjects of Virgil’s first-century (b.c.) epic, newly available in Princeton scholar Fagles’s energetic verse translation.
It succeeds Fagles’s critically acclaimed and very popular English-language renderings of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, the touchstones that preceded and inspired Virgil (the Latin poet’s hero Aeneas in fact makes a brief appearance in the Iliad). In 12 Books containing nearly 10,000 lines of unrhymed verse hexameters (i.e., six stresses per line), Virgil tells of the endangered voyages of Aeneas’s fleet of ships following the devastation of the Trojan War; his dalliance with Queen Dido of Carthage, and the abandonment of her that adds the scorned monarch’s lethal rage to that of (Aeneas’s nemesis) the offended goddess Juno; the hero’s journey to the underworld and reunion with the ghost of his father Anchises (one of classical literature’s imperishable scenes); and a litany of the deeds and sufferings of noble Romans that expands into a prophetic vision of a glorious future. Veteran scholar Bernard Knox’s replete introduction brilliantly summarizes the poem’s provenance, meanings and influence. And a “Translator’s Postscript” both emphasizes and illustrates “[Virgil’s] unequaled blend of grandeur and accessibility . . . of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity.” Fagles varies the hexameter pattern ingeniously, condensing to five stresses, or expanding to seven, depending on the desired rhetorical or emotional effect (e.g., “the dank night is sweeping down from the sky / and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep”)—and demonstrates his talents smashingly in scenes set in “The Kingdom of the Dead” (where, amid sulphurous sound and fury, we hear “. . . a crescendo of wailing, / ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share / of this sweet life, at its very threshold too”).
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement makes us remember it.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03803-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
Shivery and smart. A book that brings the legacy of Henry James into the modern world with great effect.
A psychological spook story in the best high literary tradition.
Julie and James are a happenstance couple. They met after James answered Julie’s Craigslist ad and married after he singled himself out by being the only one who kept calling. In spite of their haphazard beginnings, their marriage is a loving one, and the two are so well-suited they seem to “fit together effortlessly.” This holds true until Julie discovers that James has developed a gambling addiction and hidden it from her. In an attempt to rebuild their relationship and remove James from the locus of his compulsion, the couple buys a moldering Victorian manse in a preternaturally tranquil small town outside the city where they met, find new jobs, seek out new friends, and trade their urban lifestyle for the domestic thrills of first-time homeownership. At this point, as should be expected by anyone familiar with the haunted house tale, things quickly fall apart. The house emits an untraceable humming sound and is filled with architecturally improbable hidden rooms. The borders of the nearby woods seem to draw nearer and nearer to the back door, and the woods themselves echo with the games of unseen children. An unnerving next-door neighbor, spontaneous bruises that spread across Julie’s skin, childlike drawings that appear on the walls, and James’ periodic descent into fugue states set the stage for a read-in-one-sitting, sleep-with-the-lights-on book; however, the real scare in this truly haunting novel stems from the way Jemc (A Different Bed Every Time, 2014, etc.) keeps the psychological tension of Julie and James’ relationship taut. Telling the story from alternating perspectives, Jemc reveals Julie’s and James’ growing distrust of each other and themselves even as she manipulates the novel's language to reflect the evolution of what is either psychosis or possession.
Shivery and smart. A book that brings the legacy of Henry James into the modern world with great effect.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-53691-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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