Hill, author of superior mysteries (Ruling Passion, etc.) and so-so thrillers (The Spy's Wife, etc.), offers a much more ambitious novel this time: a tale of three WW I deserters, 1916-1918, that's fairly strong as melodrama, fairly weak when it strains for psychosexual insights and thematic resonance. The British deserter is naive farm-lad Josh, who becomes useless as a soldier after witnessing the court-martial/execution of his beloved brother (who refused to follow kamikaze orders in the Battle of the Somme); unfortunately, he's more a clumsy metaphor than a believable character—especially when his tears are described as "last fragile symbols of purity and innocence in a world of the broken, the befouled and the betrayed." The German deserter is Sergeant Lothar, an aristocrat with radical/antiwar sentiments and a guilty conscience (because of his war-widowed sister-in-law's suicide). And when Lothar and Josh team up, mid-battle, to flee, they wind up joining a large band of deserters led by Hill's third central character: Australian macho-man Viney, a heavy-handed study in repressed homosexuality. Once the newcomers join "Viney's Volunteers" in their hide-out (an abandoned German bunker in no-man's-land), tensions escalate among the deserters: pragmatic Viney and idealistic Lothar vie for power, for Josh's adoration, while some of the others give vent to sheer greed, cowardice, or bloodthirstiness. Further complications ensue when the deserters form an uneasy alliance with a French peasant-family—which includes beautiful young Nicole (whom Josh inevitably loves) and her shell-shocked brother. . .whom Josh accidentally kills, propelling Nicole into the arms of Lothar (for a one-shot pregnancy). Meanwhile, the deserters are being stalked by a British captain whose fiance was killed, unintentionally, during one of Viney's anti-Army raids. And finally, amid a German Army assault, the priorities shift in uplifting—but unlikely—directions: the British captain helps Josh and Nicole to flee together; Viney, thanks in part to the onset of sexual self-awareness (after a brief, unconvincing consummation with Josh), becomes a sort of war-hero in the corny fade-out. Throughout, in fact, though the deserter theme is relatively fresh, Hill succumbs far too often to clich‚s of character and plotting from related genres (POW/lifeboat dramas, wartime soap-operas). On the other hand, his attempts at more serious, literary textures are largely misguided: stagey speeches to reflect conflicting views on war, socialism, and other historical issues; stilted ventures into poetic language; crude proclamations of "tragic irony." And the result, while fitfully involving as action-adventure and always earnestly workmanlike, is neither absorbing as a three-cornered character study nor persuasive as an exploration of the deserter phenomenon.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1985
ISBN: 0586070850
Page Count: 397
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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