Following a popular trend, Rogers's latest (after Her Living Image, 1986, etc.) fuses the past and the present, reaching from the 18th-century founding of a British colony in Australia to a failing 20th-century English marriage, and conjoining the roles of two idealists, each disillusioned in his own time and place. When William Dawes lands in Australia as a young lieutenant in the British colonial force, he aims only to set up an observatory and carry out his assigned astronomer's duties. The difficulties of taming the wilderness and overseeing the cargo of convicts who are the first colonists, however, soon have him otherwise employed, and only in his spare time does he pursue his dream. His latter-day chronicler, Stephen Beech, similarly taxed by pursuing an idealistic mission in education amid the harsh realities of the British school system, has retreated to his research and writing. William's drive gets the observatory built, but his principles set him up for a series of falls, first with a female convict he befriends, then with another convict he has protected, only to have the man deliberately infect the natives with smallpox, to catastrophic effect. Finally, forced to go on a hunt for innocent natives who will be killed in retribution for the murder of a pederast who'd been in the favor of the colony's governor, William decides he's had enough and heads home. Stephen, having chosen a working-class wife and tried to be her Pygmalion, with her resentment and a deformed infant the only results, eventually packs it in too, going off to Australia in search of his subject—and himself. Ambitious and solidly researched, but the different centuries and their challenges remain largely in separate orbits, with only a huge effort at contrivance pulling them parallel, and then only briefly.
Pub Date: May 28, 1997
ISBN: 0-87951-753-0
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
A somewhat entertaining but mostly predictable story; Champagne fans and readers who can’t get enough WWII fiction will...
Harmel (The Room on Rue Amélie, 2018, etc.) returns with another historical novel set in France during World War II.
This novel alternates between 1940 at the Chauveau Champagne winery near Reims as the German occupation begins and the present day in the same area, where recently divorced Liv Kent’s 99-year-old grandmother, Edith, has brought her so that Edith can attend to some “business.” Gradually Liv begins to understand they are in Reims so she can learn what happened in 1940 that changed the futures of her grandparents, their friends, and the Chauveau winery. She discerns this in part from the new man in her life, Julien, grandson and partner of Edith’s longtime lawyer. Harmel weaves in real historical figures such as Otto Klaebisch, the “weinführer” in Champagne during the war, and Count Robert-Jean de Vogüé, Resistance leader and head of Moët & Chandon. The story of fictional Resistance member and Champagne proprietor Michel Chauveau may be realistic, but parts of the story about his young wife, Inès, are less convincing. The Chauveaus employ winemaker Theo Laurent, whose wife Céline’s family is Jewish. While Inès’ naïve insistence that Céline’s family is far from danger is somewhat understandable—many people were unable to believe what was happening at the time—it doesn’t square with her recollection of her WWI veteran father insisting “You can never trust the Huns!” Inès’ vacillating sympathies might reflect her youth, but they set up a chain of events that leads to dramatic changes in her life, which in turn set up the dramatic unveiling of Edith’s secrets in the modern section of the book. All of which requires suspension of disbelief. Liv’s love interest, while sudden, is somewhat more believable, as is Edith’s reluctance to tell Liv the family history. Even in those sections, Harmel resorts to formulaic moments, such as a mix-up about whether Julien is married and a scene where a character is welcomed to heaven with forgiving words from other characters.
A somewhat entertaining but mostly predictable story; Champagne fans and readers who can’t get enough WWII fiction will probably still enjoy it.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1229-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.
Rome, past and present, serves as the setting for a sparkling historical novel.
Smith (Free Men, 2016, etc.) bounds through 2,000 years of history, following four indelible characters as they grapple with questions of faith, freedom, and transgressive love. Tom, a biologist working in contemporary Rome, is studying ostracods, tiny crustaceans that thrive in polluted, agitated environments. “Are they adapting in the face of disadvantage or are they opportunists of collapse?” Tom asks, aware that his question about ostracods could just as well apply to his own emotional agitation. The married father of a 9-year-old daughter, he has met a young woman who enchants him, impelling him to confront his desperate desire for “an unleashing” and for a love deeper than what he feels for his wife. A child playing in the water where he is investigating suddenly shrieks in pain, pierced by a piece of bent metal, “scaly with corrosion, its silver marred with patches of orange rust.” It is a fishhook—maybe a castoff with no value or perhaps an ancient relic: uncanny, miraculous. The fishhook reappears as Smith leaps back to the Renaissance, where it falls into the hands of Giulia, a mixed-race princess newly married to a Medici, pregnant with another man’s child. For Giulia, her fortunes embroiled in political and religious rivalries, the fishhook evokes a holier time, before corruption and hypocrisy sullied the church. In ninth-century Rome, Felix, a 60-year-old monk, is tormented by his youthful, forbidden love for Tomaso; assigned to watch over the decaying bodies in the putridarium, Felix comes into possession of the fishhook, guessing—wishing—that it belonged to the martyred St. Prisca, who perhaps “got it direct from Jesus.” In the year 165, Prisca did indeed find the hook, secreting it as a precious token. Drawn to worshipping Christ rather than pagan gods, 12-year-old Prisca stands defiant against her violent tormenters. Perhaps Smith’s most appealing character is Satan, whose weary, ironic comments punctuate a narrative that shines with lyrical, translucent prose.
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287364-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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