An adroit, sharply drawn portrayal of Dickens’ indelible characters.
Intrigue and betrayal infest the shadowy underworld of Dickensian London.
The tight-fisted Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghost of Jacob Marley come vividly to life in an assured reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by novelist Clinch (Belzoni Dreams of Egypt, 2014, etc.), who brilliantly captures the wit and irony of Dickens’ prose as he unfurls a tale of greed, cruelty, and passion. Marley and Scrooge meet when Ebenezer is enrolled at Professor Drabb’s Academy for Boys, a wretched place where boys, virtually abandoned by their families, teach and discipline one another, cook paltry meals, and cower under Drabb’s abuse. The boys, all of them, have secrets: “Secrets are their refuge and their currency and their stock in trade.” Secrets, Marley learns early, can be powerful. Although the same age as Ebenezer, he is duplicitous and wily and soon snares the newcomer into his debt. Later, Marley takes advantage of Ebenezer’s innate timidity to make him the silent, acquiescent partner in devious enterprises. Clinch’s Scrooge is not a heartless miser but rather an “automatic counting machine” who is happiest—“if he is happy anywhere”—at his desk. He “does the ciphering and is himself something of a cipher.” Marley, a chameleon, a snake, a sly money launderer, has created a panoply of “useful, flexible, and profitable” identities and set up a host of fictitious businesses that deal in liquor, cloth, furs, and “the hides of enslaved men.” Scrooge cares nothing about Marley’s importing companies, only about keeping ledgers. But the smooth surface of Scrooge’s life becomes roiled by two women close to him: his sister Fan and her friend Belle. Fan comes to hate Marley, a man, she says, who believes “the earth itself exists only to be bought and sold.” Belle, who excites in Scrooge something like love, insists that the partnership divest itself of the slaving business. Scrooge’s efforts to win Belle and thwart Marley’s unsavory enterprises lead him into “the thicket of Marley’s deceit” and, ultimately, a final confrontation between two bitter adversaries.
An adroit, sharply drawn portrayal of Dickens’ indelible characters.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2970-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
