The pace drags, but Galland’s astute rendering of political intrigue make for an ultimately rewarding long march.
A holy war is derailed by opportunism and profiteering in this witty chronicle of the Fourth Crusade.
Galland (Revenge of the Rose, 2007, etc.) takes as her narrator a wastrel known only as the Briton, who trails an enemy to Venice intending murder followed by suicide—his own. Instead, he finds himself in the camp of Gregor of Mainz, a saintly German knight who is readying an army with Venetian financing for debarkation to the Holy Land. Unexpectedly, the Briton finds an incentive to live: Jamila, a widowed Saracen princess whom he rescues from the Venetian merchant who kidnapped her. He vows to return her to the Middle East, but the crusaders must first earn their war chest by invading Zara, Venice’s rival across the Adriatic. Loath to fight their fellow Catholics, a splinter group of knights negotiate a peaceable surrender, but Zara is sacked anyway. The Briton, whose ironic perspective is enough to keep us slogging through 600-plus pages, gains entree as a musician to meetings at which Venetians, prelates, Franks and Germans wrangle over strategy. The army is ordered on another detour, to unseat an imperial usurper in Constantinople. The Venetians expect full reimbursement from the new emperor, Alexius, but a delay in payment forces the army to winter in Constantinople. It turns out that Jamila is Jewish. Her late husband’s brother, Samuel, is the patriarch of Constantinople’s Jewish community, and he needs a wife. The Briton and Jamila are in love, but she dutifully agrees to marry Samuel. Alexius and other pretenders to the throne are wiped out by the crusaders’ former ally, Mourtzouphlos. His accession causes an impasse that will nullify the crusade, with tragic consequences for the Eastern Empire and its reluctant Western invaders.
The pace drags, but Galland’s astute rendering of political intrigue make for an ultimately rewarding long march.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-084180-5
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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