An ambitious novel from British writer North (209 Thriller Road, 1980), winner of the 1990 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction, takes the formulaic theme of disparate characters arbitrarily gathered together and turns it into a dark metaphor for our times. Set in a London boardinghouse, whose splendid Georgian exterior is merely a facade for an interior as damaged and dilapidated as its inhabitants, the novel takes place in the dying days of the year. This timing is deliberate, since the story requires both the darkness and cold—both of the heart and the season. Owned by the aging Mrs. Gorse, whom Time has left ``with a lack of gravity, the going away of all horizons,'' the house is a refuge and way station for troubled souls. There is Santay, proud and sensitive, who, confined to a wheelchair because of an accident, must depend on the kindness of others. Marek, the foreign student, lives for music and has a gift for friendship, but both his talent and friends seem to be betraying him. Gabriella, the young Italian who cleans the house in exchange for a room, is frightened of sex but nonetheless has affairs with Marek and Skim, the brooding technician who in turn yearns for Julia, Santay's friend. Over a Christmas as bleak as any of Dickens's darker imaginings, the house and its inhabitants fall apart. More than entropy has set in as wood rots, electricity fails, and characters go mad, disappear, or commit suicide. Chapel Street, like death, turns out to be just another ``black hole—Time's lair'' where the inhabitants had been all ``dead souls'' whether ``they were escaped, or trapped, or waiting.'' Like Martin Amis, to whom he has been compared, North sees Britain as already in the midst of some Anglian GîtterdÑmmerung, bereft of hope and redemption. Ultimately the unrelieved gloom is too contrived and schematic. Talented, but flawed.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1466-0
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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