Faulks remains at the peak of his considerable strength.
Faulks’s latest may lack the breadth of Birdsong (1996) or Charlotte Gray (1999), his usual deep sensibilities and conjurer’s gift for evoking time and place are what matter.
The political and psychic scars of WWI remain everywhere in France in the 1930s, even in the drab provincial city of Janvilliers – to which, one rainy night, young Anne Louvet makes her way by train to take up her new post as waitress at the shabby hotel called the Lion d’Or. From the start, there’s a mystery about Anne (Louvet isn’t even her real name), but there are also the allures of her quick intelligence, ready sense of humor – and her appealingly attractive good looks. So it is that the crass André Mattlin, architect and roué, sets his sights on her, while Anne’s own wiser and deeper heart goes out to one Charles Hartmann, who – with his barren and unhappy wife Christine – lives in the ancient mansion outside of town that he’s inherited from his father and hopes to repair. Anne’s interest in Charles is returned, and when Charles tells his wife he’s needed in Paris on business (he’s a lawyer), he in fact takes Anne on a weekend to the comfortably splendid country house of an old friend. From there on, once love is declared, the tale moves toward an ending that will break the hearts of some, strike fear into others. When Anne finally tells Charles her extraordinary, pathetic mystery, not a great deal by way of plot is released, but the novel’s truest assets are brought to vivid life indeed. The atmosphere of between-the-wars anxiety tips toward a new foreboding, making Charles’s being partly Jewish (the vile, devilish Mattlin uses this against him); various awful memories of WWI; the weakness of France’s governments; and the true horror of Anne’s girlhood secret all blend into a story of quiet and terrible power.
Faulks remains at the peak of his considerable strength.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-70453-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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