Still, quite diverting and entertaining, even if less accomplished than the dazzling Ex-Libris.
Artifice, portraiture, and gender confusion, these are the assiduously interwoven themes of a busy historical novel (originally published in England in 1995), the first written by the Canadian-born British author of Ex-Libris (2001) and the nonfiction Brunelleschi’s Dome (2000).
Set mostly in London and Milan in the 1700s, the story focuses on the central figure of aspiring young artist George Cautley, who narrates in retrospect (in 1812) the story of how his fortunes took an upward turn when he was hired to paint the portrait of Lady Petronella Beauclair, a suave aristocrat whose beauteous exterior concealed a world full of secrets. The Chinese-box structure, in which one story leads into and echoes another, efficiently reels us in. It’s the enigmatic Lady Beauclair who narrates the primary one (as part of her “payment” to the enthralled Cautley): that of Tristano, a castrato who had performed 50 years earlier in an opera troupe directed by George Frideric Handel. Cautley also makes the acquaintance of (and incurs a debt to) jaded fellow painter Sir Endymion Starker, to whom the younger artist becomes in effect apprenticed—and through whom Cautley encounters Starker’s “muse” (and victim) Eleanora Clitherow, the sinister Robert Hannah (who appears to be crucially involved with both Lady Beauclair and Eleanora), and hears further stories variously concerning all these people and others. King has researched the period with considerable skill, and he tells us a great deal—perhaps too much, rather too discursively—about the techniques of painting, the “South Sea Bubble” financial scandal (which has shaped several of its characters’ fates), and 18th-century society. Handel himself and Alexander Pope drop in briefly, and King’s lively style keeps everything moving right along. It all feels overcrowded, though, even in a fascinating dénouement that deftly ties up all loose ends.
Still, quite diverting and entertaining, even if less accomplished than the dazzling Ex-Libris.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8027-3378-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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