An entertaining historical soap opera.
Follett continues the trilogy begun with Fall of Giants (2010) with a novel that ranges across continents and family trees.
It makes sense that Follett would open with an impending clash, since, after all, it’s Germany in 1933, when people are screaming about why the economy is so bad and why there are so many foreigners on the nation’s streets. The clash in question, though, is a squabble between journalist Maud von Ulrich, née Lady Maud Fitzherbert—no thinking of Brigitte Jones here—and hubby Walter, a parliamentarian headed for stormy times. Follett’s big project, it seems, is to reduce the bloody 20th century to a family saga worthy of a James Michener, and, if the writing is less fluent than that master’s, he succeeds. Scrupulous in giving characters major and minor plenty of room to roam on the stage, Follett extends the genealogy of the families introduced in the first volume, taking into account the twists and turns of history: If Grigori Peshkov was a hero of the Bolshevik Revolution, his son Volodya is a dutiful soldier of the Stalin regime—dutiful, but not slavishly loyal. Indeed, most of the progeny here spend at least some of the time correcting the mistakes of their parents’ generation: Carla von Ulrich becomes a homegrown freedom fighter in Germany, which will have cliffhanger-ish implications at the very end of this installment, while Lloyd Williams, son of a parliamentarian across the Channel, struggles against both fascism and communism on the front in the Spanish Civil War. (Lloyd’s a perspicacious chap; after all, even George Orwell needed time and distance from the war to gain that perspective.) Aside from too-frequent, intrusive moments of fourth-wall-breaking didacticism—“Supplying weaponry was the main role played by the British in the French resistance”—Follett’s storytelling is unobtrusive and workmanlike, and he spins a reasonable and readable yarn that embraces dozens of characters and plenty of Big Picture history, with real historical figures bowing in now and then. Will one of them be Checkers, Richard Nixon’s dog, in volume 3? Stay tuned.
An entertaining historical soap opera.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-525-95292-3
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Faulks's fourth novel, an English bestseller, is his second (after A Fool's Alphabet, 1993) to appear in the US: a riveting story of love—and incalculable suffering—during WW I. What could become mere period romance is transformed, in this writer's hands, into dramatized history with a power almost Tolstoyan. Faulks renders love as compellingly as war—as in the opening chapters, when 20-year-old Britisher Stephen Wraysford, on business in Amiens, falls passionately in love with the childless and unhappily married Isabelle Azaire, nine years his senior, and steals her away. This is in 1910, and when Isabelle, secretly pregnant, suffers from overwhelming guilt, she abandons Stephen, returning to her unloving husband; six years later, Wraysford is near Amiens again, now as a Lieutenant (soon Captain) with the British Expeditionary Force, preparing for battle in what is to be the butchery of the Somme valley. Isabelle and Wraysford will meet briefly again—and both will be changed forever by the catastrophic war about to sweep over humanity, changing entire generations. Faulks's depictions of war in the trenches—and in the mazes of deadly tunnels beneath them—are extraordinary, graphic, powerful, and unsparing. Stephen will survive to war's end, and so will Isabelle, though not before both are changed beyond recognition, and doomed not to be rejoined again. The war, here, is Faulks's real subject, his stories of destroyed lives, however wrenching, only throwing its horror into greater relief and making it the more unbearable. An ending too neatly symbolic can be pardoned, while a denouement describing the birth of Wraysford's and Isabelle's great-grandson—in 1979, when their lost histories have been ferreted out by a granddaughter named Elizabeth, the new mother—is so perfectly conceived and delivered as to bring tears to the reader insufficiently steeled. Once more, Faulks shows his unparalleled strengths as a writer of plain human life and high, high compassion. A wonderful book, ringing with truth.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43545-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gripping tale of a trio's bittersweet friendship as it's tested by love and by turbulent times in 20th-century China. Meticulously attentive as usual to those cultural and historical details that give her writing an accessible authenticity, Lord (Spring Moon, 1981; a memoir, Legacies, 1990) tells the story of Steel Hope, the son of the ancient house of Li; Mountain Pine, the brother of Steel Hope's wet-nurse; and Summer Wishes, daughter of a former barge captain. The friendship begins in childhood in the 1930s on the banks of the Yangtze River when the two boys and Summer Wishes, at first pretending to be a boy in order to do her ailing father's work, swear oaths of loyalty—a loyalty that's unchanged even by the discovery of Summer Wishes's true identity. Later, there are additional incidents of muddied identity, but these confusions are secondary to the love that develops between Steel Hope and Summer Wishes, who grows up to become an opera singer. On the sidelines watching, meanwhile, is scholarly Mountain Pine, torn between his loyalty to Steel Hope and his own love for Summer Wishes. The ties that bind are further tested when war breaks out, first against the Japanese, then between the Communists and Nationalists: The lovers are parted; Steel Hope, assumed killed in an accident, goes underground to join a Maoist cadre; and a despairing Summer Wishes marries Mountain Pine and bears him a son. She and Steel Hope finally get together again when Mountain Pine is imprisoned, then are temporarily separated once more by the Cultural Revolution. At a reunion of the three friends, Steel Hope meets Summer Wishes's granddaughter, who later, as Tiananmen Square further roils these characters' lives, offers some continuity and comfort. A love story, quietly elegiac, that, like a scene in a classic Chinese painting, captures a moment when to love and live were perilous and often impossible. (First printing of 100,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-53432-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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