A little too pat and intermittently predictable to qualify for Masterpiece Theater. But the BBC should be quick to snap it...
An immensely readable debut, a kind of British Rich Man, Poor Man, set during the early days of the Battle of Britain.
Twin brothers William and Tom Anderson, who will prove quite different temperamentally, are born in 1918 to the sound of armistice bells ringing in the end of WWI. In brief chapters summarizing events of succeeding years, we observe the boys’ childhood through early manhood—often through the eyes of their gossipy neighbors, widowed Marigold Jennings and spinster “Miss Betty.” Corrick overuses this catty pair, though once in a while their pseudoaphoristic observations strike home (e.g., “Devotion is no basis for marriage,” a perverse truism illustrated by the boys’ incompatible parents). Through 1939, we watch William turn scholarly and “poetic” (with a taste for Tennyson), while Tom surrenders himself to the poetry of aviation. The bulk of the tale covers the year 1940, as Tom becomes a Spitfire pilot hopefully pursuing an elusive woman flyer. William, meanwhile, marries an older woman doctor and secures a teaching position at Liberty Hall, a progressive school for preadolescents run by a Panglossian, Blake-quoting obsessive and eccentric neatly named Masterman (“My pedagogic aim is the abolition of irrational belief”). Parallel scenes (often too brief to fully register) detail Tom’s fateful progression toward an airfight over the English Channel, and the mock-Chaucerian “pilgrimage” to Canterbury undertaken by Masterman and company when Liberty Hall is commandeered by the British Army. The introduction of such marginally involved, though thematically crucial, characters as rescued Polish refugee Janosz Pasenik intensifies the skillfully tangled separate stories, which dovetail toward a satisfying close, in a momentarily peaceful churchyard echoing with complex images of death and rebirth.
A little too pat and intermittently predictable to qualify for Masterpiece Theater. But the BBC should be quick to snap it up.Pub Date: April 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50812-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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