British author Billington (Loving Attitudes, 1988, etc.) sets out for a romp in this quicksilver collection of interconnecting novellas about a pair of lovers whose stars cross in five different time frames, but always in the same place. The Theo and Mathilda of the present are only sketchily rendered, like bookends, at the opening and finish here. They are a young married couple who purchase one of several dozen units constructed on the site of an ancient monastery in the West Country of England, and settle down, with Theo vowing that if they're ever parted, it will be ``only a temporary separation.'' His claim rings true, since the first Theo and Mathilda meet back in 770he a poetical young oaf, taken in by a ragtag collection of monks, she the daughter of King Cynewulf of Wessex, prideful, independent, but utterly drawn to Theo. Together, they build a church and connecting monastery and convent, with Theo as the unlikely abbot and Mathilda as the abbess. For years they struggle against their love, until Viking raiders finish them both off before any fleshly sin gets committed. Their next reincarnation comes during Henry IV's pillaging of England's monasteries, when Mathilda abducts the displaced monk Theo and has her way with him. Three hundred years later, Theo is an eccentric herpetologist and Mathilda his long-suffering wife; and when l980 rolls around, the two of them finally arrive at the fate they seem to have been aiming at all along: They're both mad, incarcerated in a mental hospital but embarking on a love affair nonetheless. Down through the ages, the Theo and Mathilda tales support Shakespeare's observation about the close connection between lunatics and lovers. Along the way, Billington reuses themes and details in entertaining ways, and studies a love relationship from a variety of anglesall of which makes for loony little valentine of a book, sappy but always intelligent.
Pub Date: May 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016483-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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