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 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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