A gimmick in search of a plot, and far duller than it should have been, given the material.
Boyne (Crippen, 2006, etc.) offers a historical fantasy about a 256-year-old man.
Matthieu Zéla is a fortunate man. He has discovered the secret of perpetual middle age, as Oscar Levant said of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Though never a father himself, he has lived through nine generations of nephews, each of whom, after fathering a son, has died in his 20s; Matthieu has been given their unused years. It’s a silly idea, but it does allow Boyne to dip into history at will. Matthieu was born in Paris in 1743. After his stepfather murdered his mother and was executed, 15-year-old Matthieu left for England with his five-year-old half-brother Tomas. On the cross-Channel boat, he met 19-year-old Dominique, also fleeing France; the three became a family. Boyne moves back and forth among many time periods. There is Matthieu’s coming-of-age year, 1760, and there is his present, 1999. In between, Boyne inserts several pieces of history, ranging from the 1793 Paris Terror to the Hollywood blacklist of the McCarthy period. The constant is narrator Matthieu, who makes money and connections with improbable ease, whether working for the pope in Rome as an arts administrator in 1847 or falling into a role as TV producer in 1940s Hollywood. Unfortunately, Boyne has no feeling for the past, and Matthieu’s voice is bland, so that even the guillotining of his first nephew counts for little; like the many other violent incidents, it is told with a practiced glibness. Boyne does a little better with Matthieu’s origins (Dominique’s death provides a rare moment of genuine excitement) and the present, in which Matthieu is trying to save his drug-addicted nephew, the star of a BBC soap, from yet another early grave. It’s a tough assignment, but Matthieu pulls it off; once said nephew is set for a long life, Matthieu can settle into old age.
A gimmick in search of a plot, and far duller than it should have been, given the material.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-35480-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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