With spare, lean prose, British novelist Edric (The Broken Lands, 2001, etc.) creates a haunting and disturbing meditation...
A despairing portrait of humanity as it exists on Britain’s Fenland coast at the end of WWII.
Concealed in the dunes, James Mercer watches as 15-year-old Mary Lynch walks the shores of the Fens in the summer of 1946. The moment is significant. Mercer spends much of this somber tale carefully observing the inhabitants of a small village and the workers who have come there to dismantle, under his supervision, gun platforms built during the war. Mercer also studies, then becomes engaged with two men: Jacob Haas, a Dutch Jew and concentration camp survivor mourning the loss of his sister Anna; and Mathias Weisz, a German soldier captured at Normandy by the British. Regarding their experiences from his home in a tower at the edge of an abandoned airfield, Mercer realizes that life in this “wasteland” during peacetime will scarcely differ from their desperate existences on the continent during wartime. In trenchant dialogues, Mercer and his acquaintances look to the dark past and the bleak future. Haas, in failing health, recalls sadistic and harrowing camp incidents, one of which took the life of his sister. Weisz remembers the dissolution of his home. Mercer gradually becomes more actively committed to the lives around him. He moves to defend Lynch from her crude, bullying father and to protect Haas from the violent anti-Semitism of workers who fear the loss of their jobs and the inevitable dissolution of the village, which Edric renders in stark images. Seeking refuge from an angry mob, Weisz and Haas again find themselves in hiding; the postwar period brings no significant change or improvement to their lives. The war, Mercer observes, “still clung to everything it had once touched.”
With spare, lean prose, British novelist Edric (The Broken Lands, 2001, etc.) creates a haunting and disturbing meditation about an empty, abandoned world passing through a meaningless transition.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-552-77206-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Swan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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