A Russian war story that lives and breathes from a writer at the peak of his powers.
A novel examines civil war and prophecy in the years following the Russian Revolution.
In his Kamas Trilogy, Fleming (Forty Days at Kamas, 2015, etc.) described a totalitarian future that may yet arrive. In his new stand-alone tale, the prognosticator turns his pen to a half-imagined history, a totalitarian past that needn’t have been. Sent to Siberia by the United States during the Russian civil war of 1918, when the Communist Bolsheviks fought the Nationalist White Guard in the wake of the czar’s execution, Ned Du Pont finds himself providing aimless backup for the Nationalists in “a miserable little fight.” In this battle, American troops are expressly forbidden to directly engage the enemy, whomever that is. Then he meets the Maid of Baikal. Like her namesake, the Maid of Orléans, young Zhanna Dorokhina hears voices. As with Joan of Arc, those voices belong to saints, and their words provide not only courage in the face of adversity, but also precise wartime tactics the White Guard must obey if it hopes to gain a foothold on success. “My voices tell me Uralsk must be retaken by summer,” Zhanna tells White leader Adm. Alexander Kolchak. “If not, the Red Army will surely breach our defenses at Ufa and sweep across Siberia from Yekaterinburg to the Pacific.” Half entranced by Zhanna’s spiritual mission and half in love with the very real young woman in his charge, Ned finds himself in the position of helping her fulfill her prophesies. His assignment soon becomes a calling and he tries as best he can to both prevent Zhanna’s murder at the hands of a vengeful religious tribunal—the same fate that befell her predecessor—and to use the connections his family name delivers to secure arms and ammunition for the anti-Communist front. Fleming achieves the near impossible in this long book, keeping dozens of plots spinning while he catches the reader up both on what historically transpired and how different outcomes might have plausibly happened. Character after character is ushered into the theater of war, made memorable, then variously deployed to raise the stakes. Treachery, espionage, heroism, or romance seem to hover around each encounter, and the reader is placed in the unusual and invigorating position of watching history come alive with no idea of how it’s going to end.
A Russian war story that lives and breathes from a writer at the peak of his powers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
