A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.
The seven ages of man, and woman, are traced against the tremendous historical and social shifts of a switchback century.
“He could bend, she could not.” That, in a nutshell, is the dynamic of the marriage between Harry Miles and Evelyn Hill, a union that starts in the early years of World War II, stretches over multiple decades, and concludes in fog, fading, and—for readers of this new novel from Page (The Two of Us, 2016, etc.)—quite possibly a lump in the throat. A tale of England in the second half of the 20th century, of social mobility, sex, love, and pain, it’s also an appreciation of poetry, the literary form that Harry discovers as a schoolboy and which remains his touchstone throughout a long life. A scholarship boy, Harry transcends his working-class origins thanks to education and a “good” war, emerging to father three clever children, build a comfortable new home, and secure a solid white-collar job. His other constant is his love for Evelyn, although their natures are not a perfect match. Harry is patient and peaceable, while Evelyn is more driven and increasingly intransigent. Page’s treatment of what is in essence an ordinary story of two English people’s long domestic involvement against a rolling pageant of external events quietly hums with emotional charge. The war years, with Harry fighting in North Africa and Evelyn struggling with a young child at home, are especially vivid, but this watchful, empathetic chronicle retains sensitivity through the less obviously eventful decades of home-building and child-rearing. Harry’s perspective dominates, the inner landscape of a man attuned to nature, to detail, to old-fashioned virtues. Querulous, perfectionist Evelyn hardens and flattens into two dimensions as the arc of the marriage tips down toward its late phase, yet Page’s watchful and very British tale remains devoted to both and forgiving to the end.
A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77196-209-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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