Another bold step forward for a “traditional” writer who seldom fails to make the long-ago and faraway seem as near as the...
The conventional theme of an unspoiled paradise threatened by progress is treated with keen intelligence in the Scottish author’s ninth novel.
It essentially resembles her acclaimed historical novels The Sea Road (not reviewed) and Voyageurs (2004) in that it’s set in a remote place and involves elemental contests of will between strongly imagined characters. The year is 1831, and the (somewhat minimal) plot pits sisters-in-law Lucy and Diya Geddes and their three children (Lucy’s fatherless son Billy, widowed Diya’s daughters Breesha and Mally) against two strangers who arrive at Ellan Bride, a small island near the Isle of Man, where Lucy has assumed the lighthouse keeper’s duties formerly performed by Diya’s now-deceased husband. The initially unwelcome visitors are surveyor Archibald Buchanan and his assistant, Ben Groat, employed by Robert Stevenson (who, as readers of Bella Bathurst’s popular historical study The Lighthouse Stevensons will recall, was the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson). The two are to study the possibility of building a new lighthouse on the island. If their mission is accomplished, the fragmented families of roughhewn, pragmatic Lucy and gentle, abstracted (Indian-born) Diya will surely be dispossessed. Resulting complications affect both intimacies that develop, over a taut three-day span, among the four adults, and the children determined to protect the pristine haven they have grown to love. Elphinstone’s descriptions of Ellan Bride’s topography and climate, flora and fauna, are as lovely as they are precise, and the range of characterizations developed within her novel’s small compass is quite remarkable. But the story feels somewhat over-familiar, and there are perhaps a few too many echoes of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and D.H. Lawrence’s tense novella, “The Fox.” Still, Elphinstone works subtle variations on the themes of illumination, enclosure and fulfillment, and the narrative holds the reader’s interest throughout.
Another bold step forward for a “traditional” writer who seldom fails to make the long-ago and faraway seem as near as the matter of our own everyday lives.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-84195-880-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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