The medieval episodes, like campfire tales, are enjoyable in their own right; otherwise, Davenport’s latest is a mess.
Could a knight from olde England have an antiwar message for today’s British government? Anything’s possible in Davenport’s mixed-up second novel.
It’s 1372, and Sir Guy de Bryan, veteran warrior and diplomat serving King Edward III, is leaving for Genoa on a vital trade mission. Behind him, in the village of Slapton, is a chapel where priests will sing Masses for his soul. Guy believes he has committed three great sins, and the details are buried like truffles, deep in the text. Once unearthed, two are clearly not sins at all; Guy is blaming himself for accidents beyond his control. The knight is almost unbearably virtuous; that’s the view of Sir John Molyns, the impressive and underutilized villain. Molyns is a stone-cold killer, contemptuous of Guy’s battlefield chivalry. Suddenly, vertigo, as Davenport fast-forwards to contemporary New York, where hawkish young Beth Battock, a British government aide, is assuring Americans of British support for preemptive war. Davenport’s penchant for moving between centuries (see The Painter, 2003) is a shame. He’s far more robust in the past. As for Beth’s tenuous link to the 14th century, she’s a direct descendant of the licentious priest who arranged Guy’s masses; ever since, her family has continued to sing them. Davenport is on more solid ground going over the key episodes of Guy’s life: the siege of Calais, the brushes with Molyns, two jousting tournaments for the hand of Elizabeth and his eventual blissful marriage to her. Towering above is the battle at Crécy, where Guy sanctioned the use of cannonballs and inadvertently ended the age of chivalry (his second big sin). This led to the antiwar Declaration inscribed in his chapel, which will in turn, after a series of absurd contrivances, be cited approvingly by the British Foreign Secretary, resigning to protest his country’s support for war.
The medieval episodes, like campfire tales, are enjoyable in their own right; otherwise, Davenport’s latest is a mess.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-80217-8
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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