Densely textured but slow-moving, with a mystery whose tangled mess of multiple plots and plotters is only partly resolved...
Giordano Bruno, the excommunicated monk attached to both the French embassy and the spy network of Sir Francis Walsingham, is lured to Canterbury by still another troubled attachment.
In 1584, Bruno thinks he’s put Sophia Underhill, whom he loved in vain in Heresy (2010, etc.), behind him. And so he has, but only in the sense that she’s dogging his steps in London disguised as a boy. When he recognizes her, she appeals once more for his help. Sir Edward Kingsley, the much older magistrate to whom her aunt married her off after an illegitimate child exiled her from the life she’d known, has been brained with a crucifix in Canterbury Cathedral under conditions that echo the martyrdom of Thomas Becket and make Sophia the obvious suspect. Only Bruno, she insists, can vindicate her by unmasking her hated husband’s killer. Under protest, Bruno persuades Walsingham to dispatch him to Canterbury, ostensibly to report back on the doings of Dr. Harry Robinson, the spymaster’s man inside the Cathedral Chapter, but secretly accompanied by Sophia, still disguised as Kit. He soon identifies several other promising suspects: Sir Edward’s wastrel son Nicholas; physician/alchemist Dr. Ezekiel Sykes; and cathedral gatekeeper Tom Garth, whose sister Sarah died in the Kingsley home nine years ago under mysterious circumstances. In the meantime, however, Bruno stumbles into much deeper waters, from the disappearances of a number of young boys to a plot to revive the Becket cult, dormant ever since the disappearance of the saint’s bones, to a conspiracy involving the alchemical theories of Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistus. Instead of flying below the radar, as Walsingham bade him, Bruno finds himself swiftly making influential enemies as well.
Densely textured but slow-moving, with a mystery whose tangled mess of multiple plots and plotters is only partly resolved by Bruno’s trial for murder, attempted murder and larceny.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53547-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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