Another Irishman’s reimagining of classical epic’some 75 years after Joyce’s Ulysses—gives impressive depth and pathos to this first novel from the versatile writer best known for his recent play The Steward of Christendom. Barry’s eponymous hero is “exiled” from his home in Sligo when a passion for the culture of his beloved France inspires him to enlist in the British Merchant Navy (in 1916). But Eneas is shipped instead to Galveston, Texas, and his disillusionment increases when he returns to Sligo to a traitor’s welcome. Making matters worse, he joins the Royal Irish Constabulary and is subsequently marked for execution by his homeland’s revolutionaries, one of whom—his boyhood friend Jonno Lynch—dedicates himself to pursuing the vagrant Eneas. The elusive wanderer’s travels then take him to England, France at last (where he literally labors in vineyards), furtively back home to visit his subdued (though still loving) parents and sister Teasy (now a cloistered nun), and, most interestingly, to Nigeria as another World War looms. But Lagos—as Eneas ruefully notes, a near anagram of “Sligo——is also haunted by “Deathly, killing, seducing politics,” though there is the lifelong friendship Eneas forms with Harcourt, an epileptic native Nigerian with whom he’ll eventually be reunited when at last, in his 70th year, he returns to Sligo to await the carrying-out of the sentence pronounced on him decades before. Eneas’s story, which climaxes with a surprising fulfillment of the violent fate he has long expected, is crowned by a complex and honestly earned vision of “redemption.” And Barry tells it in a gorgeous, mellifluous rush of passionate language that often alludes specifically to Virgil’s Aeneid (it’s especially tempting to view Harcourt as a male counterpart of Aeneas’ beloved Carthaginian queen Dido) while accommodating both magnificent invective (“You low dog on all fours, you poor fighting pup with your tail bitten off by a tinker at birth”) and sorrowfully lyrical meditations on the ruin of Eneas’ country and people. One of the best novels out of Ireland in many a year.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87828-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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