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
This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached...
An Artist of the Floating World featured Japanese characters; here, Ishiguro breaks new ground with a slow-moving rumination on the world of the English country-house butler.
For 35 years, Stevens was Lord Darlington's butler, giving faithful service. Now, in 1956, Darlington Hall has a new, American owner, and Stevens is taking a short break to drive to the West Country and visit Mrs. Benn, the housekeeper until she left the Hall to get married. The novel is predominantly flashbacks to the '20s and '30s, as Stevens evaluates his profession and concludes that "dignity" is the key to the best butlering; beyond that, a great butler devotes himself "to serving a great gentleman—and through the latter, to serving humanity." He considers he "came of age" as a butler in 1923, when he successfully oversaw an international conference while his father, also a butler, lay dying upstairs. A second key test came in 1936, when the housekeeper announced her engagement (and departure) during another major powwow. Each time, Stevens felt triumphant—his mask of professional composure never slipped. Yet two things become clear as Stevens drives West. Lord Darlington, as a leading appeaser of Hitler, is now an utterly discredited figure; far from "serving humanity," Stevens had misplaced his trust in an employer whose life was "a sad waste." As for the housekeeper, she had always loved Stevens, but failed to penetrate his formidable reserve; and at their eventual, climactic meeting, which confirms that it's too late for both of them, he acknowledges to himself that the feeling was mutual.
This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached prose; yet there is something doomed about Ishiguro's effort to enlist sympathy for such a self-censoring stuffed shirt, and in the end he can manage only a small measure of pathos for his disappointed servant.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1989
ISBN: 0679731725
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Admirers of Ferrante’s work will eagerly await the third volume.
Roman à clef by the reclusive author who writes under the name Elena Ferrante (The Lost Daughter, 2008, etc.): a beautifully written portrait of a sometimes difficult friendship.
Set, as is so much of her work, in her native Naples, Italy, Ferrante’s latest is a study in the possibility of triumph over disappointment. Its narrator, Elena Greco, is the daughter of a man who has managed by dint of hard work to rise only to the lowly position of porter at the city government building. Elena is brilliant, but less so than her friend Raffaella Cerullo, called—confusingly, for readers without Italian—Lila or Lina depending on who is talking. Both women, born in the year of liberation, 1944, are ambitious, whip-smart, as at home in the pages of Aristotle as in the hills of their still-battered city. Their native milieu is poor and barely literate, but both have emerged from it, despite the distractions afforded by the boys they like and the violence occasionally visited by those whom they don’t. Lina has always outpaced Elena in every way, not least intellectually; as Elena recalls, “I saw that after half a page of the philosophy textbook she was able to find surprising connections between Anaxagoras, the order that the intellect imposes on the chaos of things, and Mendeleev’s tables.” That chaos, in the first volume of the trilogy to which this volume belongs, swept Lina away from her ambitions toward a domesticity that seems almost arbitrary, while Elena, the very definition of a survivor, forged on. Lina, it appears, will always consider her the lesser of equals, someone who, Elena frets, “couldn’t even imagine that I might change.” Yet, as Ferrante recounts, it is late-blooming Elena whose turn it is to flourish, despite setbacks and false starts; this second book closes with her embarking on what promises to be a brilliant literary career and with the hint that true love may not be far behind.
Admirers of Ferrante’s work will eagerly await the third volume.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60945-134-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
SEEN & HEARD
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