Set in the pre-Waterloo days of the peninsula campaign, Tillyard’s narrative explores both military and personal maneuvers as Wellington seeks victory on the battlefields and some of his officers seek victory in the bedrooms.
The novel easily mixes the historical and the fictional. Tillyard’s Wellington is stiff, overbearing and scant with praise for his fellow officers. He leaves his wife Kitty on the homefront in London, and she is forced to deal with more than her husband realizes, most notably the appearance of Mrs. Fitzwilliam, Wellington’s mistress, and an illegitimate son about which the general has no knowledge. As Wellington struggles militarily in Spain and Portugal, Kitty shrewdly takes control of her own financial affairs with the good advice of Nathan Rothschild, another historical figure who makes a fortune through astute wartime business practices. We also follow fictional characters James Raven, one of Wellington’s officers, and his new bride Harriet, an intellectual woman who shares her father’s scientific proclivities. While James is in Spain, he becomes romantically involved with Camille Florens, whose Irish father has taught her to hate all things English. She readily manipulates James at the same time Harriet in London has become enamored with Frederick Winsor, a German who has Anglicized his name from Friedrich Winzer and whose interest in developing sources of light and heat appeal to Harriet’s scientific aptitudes. James comes back disillusioned both with war and with the spoils of war, and he and Harriet are obviously estranged in their short time together before James is summoned once again to fight on the continent at Waterloo. Solid historical fiction, with vivid characters and vibrant local color.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9457-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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 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
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