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 vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few...
In 1956, a pair of college roommates meets again in Tangier, with terrifying results.
“At first, I had told myself that Tangier wouldn’t be so terrible,” says Alice Shipley, a young wife dragged there by her unpleasant husband, John McAllister, who has married her for her money. He vanishes every day into the city, which he adores, while Alice is afraid to go out at all, having once gotten lost in the flea market. Then Lucy Mason, her one-time best friend and roommate at Bennington College, shows up unannounced on her doorstep. “I had never, not once in the many moments that had occurred between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the dusty alleyways of Morocco, expected to see her again.” Alice and Lucy did not part on good terms; there are repeated references to a horrible accident which will remain mysterious for some time. What is clear is that Lucy is romantically obsessed with Alice and that Alice is afraid of her. In chapters that alternate between the two women’s points of view, the past and the present unfold. The two young women bonded quickly at Bennington: though Alice is a wealthy, delicate Brit and Lucy a rough-edged local on scholarship, both are orphans. Or at least Lucy says she is—from the start, there are inconsistencies in her story that put Alice in doubt. And while Alice is so frightened of Tangier that she can’t leave the house, Lucy feels right at home: she finds the maze of souks electrifying, and she quickly learns to enjoy the local custom of drinking scalding hot mint tea in the heat. She makes a friend, a shady local named Joseph, and immediately begins lying to him, introducing herself as Alice Shipley. Something evil this way comes, for sure. Mangan’s debut pays homage to The Talented Mr. Ripley and to the work of Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson.
A vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few head-scratchers, including the evil-lesbian trope. Film rights have already been sold; it will make a good movie.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268666-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Flamboyantly written, if a little too conventionally peopled and plotted.
A treasure hunt leads a young girl to discover her mother’s darkest secret.
In 1936, 9-year-old Alice has been consigned by her mother, Selina Lennox Carew, to the care of her Lennox grandparents at their ancestral stately home, Blackwood Park. The reason for this custodial arrangement is Selina’s trip to Southeast Asia with Alice’s cold, distant father, Rupert, who needs to visit his ruby mines in Burma. Alice is kept abreast of her parents’ travels through her mother’s letters, delivered by longtime family servant Polly. Alice is also directed, by Polly, to discover clues set by her mother, leading the girl on a treasure hunt that helps lift her out of her depression. Alice’s Blackwood sojourn alternates with chapters set in 1925, when young Selina, age 22, is setting the London tabloids ablaze with her antics as one of a cadre of Bright Young People, devil-may-care upper-class flappers and their escorts. But everything changes when, on a madcap treasure hunt of her own, Selina meets Lawrence Weston, a struggling portrait painter and aspiring photographer. The two are drawn inexorably into an affair. Selina's choice of a passionless marriage to Rupert over life with her soul mate, Lawrence, is the fateful decision on which the novel turns, and her rationalizations will be a little too pat to satisfy most readers. Nor will readers be long baffled by Alice’s hunt—given the 1925 backstory, the solution to the puzzle is obvious almost from the start. But genuine surprises do await, even if they entail punishing Selina, after the manner of post-Code Hollywood melodrama, for her breach of class boundaries, disregard for propriety, and unladylike smoking and drinking. The characters verge on stereotypical although there are no true villains and only the domestics lack flaws, particularly Polly and Mr. Patterson, the gardener who introduces Alice to the redemptive joys of nature. However, Grey’s use of sensory detail, enlivening the most mundane of scenes, redeems this novel, too.
Flamboyantly written, if a little too conventionally peopled and plotted.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-06679-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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