An engrossing and moving war drama with a strong cast of indelible characters.
A World War I novel follows a platoon of British volunteers who eventually fight in the disastrous Battle of the Somme.
The facts in this fictional story are well known to the most casual student of history. World War I—“The Great War”—begins in 1914. In Britain, patriotic young men rush to sign up. They will teach Germany an unforgettable lesson in three or four months. Instead, four years later, an exhausted Europe realizes that there has never been butchery on such a scale, and nowhere so brutally as the 1916 Somme offensive, when the Allies tried to break through a massive trench line. Over 20,000 British troops lost their lives in just the first two hours. But what will really draw readers into Temple-Smith’s (The Story of Elijah, 2005) novel are the vivid sketches of the Brits in the second platoon of the “St. Marylebone Rifles.” There is 2nd Lt. Arnold Snow, considering it his duty to volunteer and acquitting himself well. There is Frank Claybourne, a petty thief who enlists after he accidentally kills a mark. There is Alec Millcross, who sees this war as the ticket to becoming a famous poet. There is Lord Roland Selway, son of the Duke of Dornoch, who rebels against an arranged marriage. Joining them are Fred Quill, retired after an honorable career but wanting one more chance to serve, and Cpl. Seamus O’Malley, whose philosophy embodies whatever profits Seamus O’Malley. There are many more, of course, some who make it back alive and some who don’t. But all are meticulously portrayed. Focus is paramount: Every early chapter is devoted to one of these soldiers and—a fearful symmetry—the last section skillfully reveals how each man lived or died in the carnage. The author’s prose is reserved, traditional—British. His writing style is well suited to the era’s spirit and often elegiac: “Victory in 1918 did not usher in an age of tranquility and comfort, but as far as they could, after their own fashions, at their own stations in life, and with varying degrees of success, these men who remained led reasonably contented lives. They all did their best.” There is no lack of World War I novels, but the audience will find that reading Temple-Smith’s book is both a pleasure and a privilege.
An engrossing and moving war drama with a strong cast of indelible characters.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-910603-68-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: GWL Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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