An enchanting cabinet of curiosities and wonders.
Nine tales of human endurance, accomplishment, and epiphany told with style and brio.
Mason is one of our best historical novelists, creating panoramas of rich detail, propulsive plot, and artful character development in novels such as The Piano Tuner (2002) and The Winter Soldier (2018). In his first story collection, he shows how quickly and completely he can immerse readers in a foreign place and time. “Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw” is—if you’ll forgive the wordplay—a knockout punch: 17 short, numbered rounds recounting the life of a Bristol stevedore whose fate awaits him in the ring of an 1824 boxing match so vividly described you can almost taste the blood. (Yes, the title is a spoiler.) “The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace” follows an English “bug collector” and “species man” who is “entranced by life’s variety” to go to the Malay Archipelago, where, burning with fever, he concocts a theory of the natural world: “Everywhere he looked he saw the struggle for existence. He could not happen upon an insect without wondering how every trait had saved it from nature’s forge.” Did we mention that this real-life, little-remembered figure is also a correspondent of the great and celebrated Charles Darwin, whose return letters mysteriously cease once the theory has been shared? In “The Line Agent Pascal,” the titular Frenchman maintains a solitary railway station deep in the Amazon rainforest, his only human connection coming, Twitter-like, with other agents along the telegraph line. “However distant his colleagues were, he’d come to understand them intimately over the years, could describe each man, each station, with details he had never seen,” Mason writes. A pair of stories with female protagonists—one an 18th-century hot air balloonist—offer relief from an overwhelmingly male cast.
An enchanting cabinet of curiosities and wonders.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-47763-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
PROFILES
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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