A different sort of storyteller, English novelist Binding shifts from the macabre world of hangings in A Perfect Execution (1996) to the furtive hazards of collaboration among Britain’s Guernsey Islanders under Nazi occupation. For them, the horrors of war are muted, allowing an intensely personal tale of romance, duty, and murder to emerge. Life on Guernsey is certainly different after the Germans arrive, but for all the added gun emplacements, gangs of gaunt foreign laborers, short food rations, and jackbooted troops, it’s still possible for two men to be in love with the same woman. Ned Luscombe loved Isobel first, before the war, and she reciprocated even though the chasm of class yawned wide between them. By the time the highly cultured, sensitive Major Lentsch arrives to command the occupation force, however, the ardor between Ned and Isobel has cooled, and as the new head of the island police force Ned can only look on as she takes up with his boss. But then Isobel is murdered, and the two rivals are required to join forces in a painful investigation. Along the way, they become unlikely yet fast friends, though ongoing events keep them from making much headway: Isobel’s father, the architect of the island’s metamorphosis into a fortress, disappears; a thriving black market involving soldiers and civilians comes to light; Ned’s lover before Isobel, Veronica, having already become the daylight mistress of the island’s Gestapo chief, secretly harbors one of the starving laborers—a boy with the only direct knowledge about who killed Isobel. Churning just below all this, in the witches’ brew that Guernsey has become, is the resentment of loyal British citizens who—ve been too long repressed, and a plot that will mean death for every islander should it be carried out. Credible and extraordinarily revealing: all that we are as humans, good and bad, finds embodiment on this tiny island in the midst of war.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0657-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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