A thoughtful, if sometimes lethargic, peek at the Middle East during its most volatile period.
An English professor becomes a spy in Egypt just before the Six-Day War in this novel.
While in London, Nicholas Hellyer, a professor of English literature, enjoys an amorous encounter with a stranger, who then convinces him to take a package back with him to Cambridge. The parcel turns out to be filled with illegal drugs, and Nick is arrested, with his future now in perilous doubt. But Sam Fuller, the dean of his college, offers him an unusual deal: He can make the criminal charges vanish if Nick agrees to works for British intelligence as a spy. Because the alternative is an immediate loss of livelihood, reputation, and freedom, Nick hastily consents, and is shipped off to Lebanon to undergo intensive training in Arabic, Morse code, and the complex craft of espionage. Then he’s sent to Alexandria, Egypt, to teach English literature at a university while clandestinely working as a spy. Nick is put to work quickly reconnoitering the movements of naval ships, which Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser now procures from Soviet-governed nations. Long before Nick’s adequately up to the task, he’s recruited by a German spy, Hans Fussmann, and forced to become a double agent, feeding the man carefully duplicitous reports. And despite rumors of his gay sexuality, Nick repeatedly finds himself thrust into amorous but imprudent trysts with beautiful women. Prowse (Arman’s Journey, 2011, etc.) artfully captures Nick’s precarious position in Egypt as a spy—one of his handlers describes his principal virtue, his dispensability: “That’s why you’re so valuable to us. Can’t tell you how valuable because I don’t know. Can assure you that all this secure-room malarkey ain’t exactly routine. Time for you to get it—the key thing is that you’re deniable.” The author paints a vivid picture of the Middle East in 1967 right on the cusp of war—his description of Israeli Mirage III jets flying over Cairo as a show of strength is chilling. In addition, Nick’s lack of expertise as an intelligence operative actually makes him an unusually compelling protagonist—his perspective is not yet contaminated by the cynicism or moral indifference one might expect of a more seasoned agent. Prowse’s command of the general historical time as well as the particular cultural and political landscape of Egypt is also impressive, clearly the result of either personal experience or scrupulous research, or both. But the novel’s pace is sluggish for a spy thriller, and begins to feel like a prelude to action that comes tardily and unspectacularly. The author intends the book—barely over 200 pages—as the first in a series, and one gets the impression this installment is a prologue to a more eventful sequel. In addition, Prowse can’t resist the allure of timeworn espionage-novel tropes, which make the plot seem much more formulaic than it actually is. Too often someone says something like: “Listen, my friend, not everything is as it seems.”
A thoughtful, if sometimes lethargic, peek at the Middle East during its most volatile period.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5272-0935-0
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Kernel Books
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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