Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed “reveal” is a genuine surprise.
A four-year-old girl abandoned aboard a ship touches off a century-long inquiry into her ancestry, in Morton’s weighty, at times unwieldy, second novel (The House at Riverton, 2008).
In 1913, Hugh, portmaster of Maryborough, Australia, discovers a child alone on a vessel newly arrived from England. The little girl cannot recall her name and has no identification, only a white suitcase containing some clothes and a book of fairy tales by Eliza Makepeace. Hugh and his wife, childless after several miscarriages, name the girl Nell and raise her as their own. At 21, she is engaged to be married and has no idea she is not their biological daughter. When Hugh confesses the truth, Nell’s equilibrium is destroyed, but life and World War II intervene, and she doesn’t explore her true origins until 1975, when she journeys to London. There she learns of Eliza’s sickly cousin Rose, daughter of Lord Linus Mountrachet and his lowborn, tightly wound wife, Lady Adeline. Mountrachet’s beloved sister Georgiana disgraced the family by running off to London to live in squalor with a sailor, who then abruptly disappeared. Eliza was their daughter, reclaimed by Linus after Georgiana’s death and brought back to Blackhurst, the gloomy Mountrachet manor in Cornwall. Interviewing secretive locals at Blackhurst, now under renovation as a hotel, Nell traces her parentage to Rose and her husband, society portraitist Nathaniel Walker—except that their only daughter died at age four. Nell’s quest is interrupted at this point, but after her death in 2005, her granddaughter Cassandra takes it up. Intricate, intersecting narratives, heavy-handed fairy-tale symbolism and a giant red herring suggesting possible incest create a thicket of clues as impenetrable and treacherous as Eliza’s overgrown garden and the twisty maze on the Mountrachet estate.
Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed “reveal” is a genuine surprise.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5054-9
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
Superbly translated, hypnotically written, a volume that requires and rewards slow, careful reading.
Another haunting mixture of history, memoir, and photo album from the author of The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Vertigo (2000).
Sebald’s fourth novel, like its predecessors, is a melancholy meditation on the dark side of human history. The unnamed narrator recounts the life story of Jacques Austerlitz, a polymath whose erudition, like the author’s, runs the gamut from his chosen field of architectural history to his avocation of zoology. Meeting by chance in the Antwerp railroad station, Austerlitz and the narrator fall easily into a learned conversation about the building itself that gradually leads to a discussion of the history and mysteries of Europe’s fortified cities. A friendship of sorts develops and the two meet from time to time, at first apparently without planning, to continue their chat as if no time had elapsed in between. Gradually, Austerlitz begins to reveal his personal history. In 1939, at the age of five, he was adopted and raised by an austere Welsh cleric and his equally forbidding wife. He knows nothing of his past until he is encouraged to explore history by an inspirational teacher. Eventually, Austerlitz discovers that he is a child of a Jewish couple who vanished in the Holocaust after sending him to England to escape—no surprise to those who are familiar with Sebald’s earlier work. Austerlitz recounts his story in a low-key, slow-moving, but utterly engrossing prose style, with almost no paragraph or chapter breaks, interrupted only by a series of eerie photographs of landscapes, architectural features, and hazily glimpsed faces. The tale is cunningly constructed around internal echoes, phrases repeated many pages apart, whose larger significance can be grasped only on repetition, and a complex, multilayered set of thematic correspondences that cannot be unraveled on a single reading.
Superbly translated, hypnotically written, a volume that requires and rewards slow, careful reading.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50483-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
When you’re done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller.
During German bombing raids on London during World War II, the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are secreted away to Ireland for protection.
Clonmillis Hall has seen better days. A large estate in rural Ireland belonging to the Duke of Edenmore, Clonmillis, by virtue of Ireland’s neutrality in the war, feels a world away from the bombs raining down on England. But during a secret meeting in Dublin, arrangements are made: King George’s two young daughters need to be kept safe during the Blitz, and remote Ireland seems the perfect place. The result is a series of domestic and professional frictions of nationality, class, religion, and gender. There is Dick Lascelles, the louche, charismatic diplomat in charge of the arrangements. Detective Garda Strafford, whose Anglo-Irish background sets him somewhat apart from his countrymen, oversees the estate’s security. Special Agent Celia Nashe, posing as a governess, is caught between her professional duties and being a surrogate caretaker to the serious elder princess, code-named “Ellen,” and the fiery younger girl, “Mary.” There is the irascible Duke and his household staff, who have varying levels of knowledge of the plot, and then there are those outside the estate who would seek to undermine the safety of everyone on it. Black (the pen name of Booker Prize–winning novelist John Banville) continues his storied career in the same vein as his most recent novel, Wolf on a String (2017), a historical mystery set in Prague, though his return here to his native Ireland is a welcome one. As ever, Black’s gifts of rich description and deft characterization are on display, and if the first half of the novel is more leisurely than a typical political thriller, its second half positively gallops.
When you’re done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-13301-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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