The last feverish week in the life of Christopher Marlowe, dramatist, informant and spy.
Fresh from the bed of his patron, Lord Thomas Walsingham, the storied playwright is summoned before the Queen’s Privy Council and charged with heresy, atheism and libel. There’s nothing unusual about the first two charges. Marlowe’s old friend Thomas Kyd, caught with a heretical pamphlet, has sought to save himself by claiming that he copied it for his former housemate, and the atheism of Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine is a canard throughout London. It’s the libel charge that’s most menacing. Someone calling himself Tamburlaine has posted threatening verses on the door of a Dutch church, and although Marlowe points out that “if I were to write a libel I would not make it so illiterate,” his accusers are unimpressed because, in the severe political economy of 1593, somebody has to take the blame. Indeed, Wells (The Cutting Room, 2003) presents her dark Elizabethan gallery of rogues and poets, who turn desperately on one another to save themselves from death and worse torments, as mirrors of today. “We live in desperate times, where loyalty is all,” observes Marlowe as he embarks on his quest to unmask the blustering Tamburlaine before his own life is forfeit. As the clock ticks down, Marlowe confronts his oldest friend Thomas Blaize, a player with literary aspirations; an old bookseller, Blind Grizzle; an unnamed power who offers to protect him from the charges if he will inform against Sir Walter Raleigh; and an emissary from Raleigh himself, who points out the mortal risk of accusing the Queen’s sometime favorite.
Despite the catchy title, the thin plot will disappoint readers looking for the generic pleasures of the historical mystery. What they’ll find instead is a pitiless rendering of an Elizabethan celebrity culture in which each celebrity survives by unceasingly attacking all the others.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-84195-625-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
80
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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