Gardner surrenders his license for James Bond-ing to package a multi-generational saga about the Railtons, a spy family synonymous with British Intelligence and Security, whose undercover exploits herein stretch from 1909 to 1935 and who dash wonderfully about most of the civilized world. When General Sir William Arthur Railton VC KCB DSO, who made reconnaissance, fought and was wounded at the battle of Balaclava, dies in 1909, he leaves his inheritance to his son John rather than to his brother Giles, the family's wiliest and very deserving eldest member. Resolutely, Giles sets out like a Grand Master to navigate the family through this crisis. First off, Giles engineers John's younger brother Charles' befuddled transfer from the Diplomatic Service to Military Operations 5 (MO5), the newly born British Intelligence, staffed so far by only one officer and his clerk. This is the organization meant to weld Britain's espionage activities into one formidable force. But already the Fenians are penetrating the Railton family through Malcolm Railton's wife Bridget, from Dublin, while Gustav Steinhauer, new head of the Kaiser's vast spy system, is set on fulfilling Wilhelm's vision of the German Imperial Navy—and not Britannia—as master of the great oceans. All of the Railtons, of whom there are many, sooner or later wind up in Intelligence of one sort or another, even the wives, though Giles' family does not know of his full involvement in the purchase of British shares in the new Suez Canal, his dark works in India and Egypt, his secret sessions with the new revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky. And yet it is Giles, who in the evening of his life, embraces a foreign ideology—has a personal Road-to-Damascus revelation about the power and wealth he was born into—and becomes through horrific betrayal "the first of the really great modern traitors." This is Gardner at his best. Here his quick brilliance at characterization and incredible density of anecdote and plot are far superior in tale-spinning elan to his strong start then fading interest in three appearances as Ian Fleming's glamorous ghost. The Railtons are his chef-d'oeuvre in the arts of melodrama, delicious in their adaptability to the varied countries they pass through, marvelously Byzantine as they begin spying on each other as well as on their enemies. A dynasty this strongly established is sure to return.
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1985
ISBN: 0552124885
Page Count: 541
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1985
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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