An impressive piece of mimicry, but readers in search of droll comic fiction depicting the madness inherited, so to speak,...
This almost defiantly plummy first novel by a Scots writer labors to out-Austen the immortal Jane in a deceptively mild-mannered exploration of the conflicting claims of love, property, and propriety set in a Derbyshire village near the end of the 18th century.
When jovial, empty-headed country squire Nathaniel Horne (kin to Fielding’s abrasive Squire Western) perishes in a ludicrous accident, his young son Edward stands to inherit the family’s handsome estate (and the eponymous “temple”) Winterbourne. Thirteen years pass, and Edward grows to manhood, as well as an appreciation of, not just Winterbourne, but his powerful neighbor Sir Anthony Apreece’s unhappy younger wife Daisy. Sir Anthony wants the Horne lands as much as Edward and Daisy want each other, and the story settles into a succession of (rather redundant) scenes detailing the plots in which all three involve themselves. Fleming echoes the relaxed style of the roomy traditional novel quite skillfully, filling it with both an enormity of convincing décor, idiom, detail, and walk-on characters burdened with aggressively eccentric names (Tom Glossipp, Augustus Spratchett, Digbeth Chiddlestone, et al). He also creates a nice contrast between Sir Anthony’s righteous avarice and the “unreal world” of equality for women that Daisy finds only in Fanny Burney’s popular novel Evelina. It’s all entertaining enough, but it moves at the pace of a promenade: observation, conversation, and commentary pretty much dwarf the story’s inherent drama—at least until a very odd melodramatic climax (which seems to have wandered in from another novel entirely) triggered by Sir Anthony’s vicious exploitation of Robert Pumphrey, a banker and moneylender determined not to become the villain people assume he already is.
An impressive piece of mimicry, but readers in search of droll comic fiction depicting the madness inherited, so to speak, from the activities of landownership and love may as well stick with Austen and Trollope.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6676-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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