Deft, droll, and provocatively philosophical, a novel about how much we don’t know about what we think we know.
Truth is in the eye of the beholder as 18th-century British people try to decide whether a series of freakish births represent a miracle or a fraud.
The third novel by Palmer (Version Control, 2016, etc.) is as different from its predecessors as those two were from each other. Historical fiction, it is based on a real-life hoax perpetuated by Mary Toft, a farmer's wife living in the small English town of Godalming whose claims to be giving birth to rabbits fooled the doctors attending her. It isn’t the hoax itself that interests the novelist—the machinations and motivations—but the responses of those she fooled: first her doctors; then the residents of Godalming, where the gossip spreads; and finally greater London, where the patient and her physicians are summoned to the court of King George. The primary perspective throughout the novel is that of 14-year-old Zachary Walsh, son of Godalming's preacher and apprentice to the local doctor. He wrestles with the central duality of the novel, between the faith of his father and the scientific reasoning of what was then modern medicine. There will be other dualities—men and women, city and country—as the novel mediates among different versions of reality, ones that cannot be reconciled, through the eyes of an innocent young man who lacks experience in the ways of the world but quickly finds himself challenged by a rash of experiences. “Come to London,” invites a young woman with whom he falls in love, as love also becomes a question of faith or delusion. “Perhaps there are still other versions of myself I have to show you; versions of yourself you haven’t seen.” At the center of the novel, Mary herself is given little space to express herself, limited to two short chapters (“Mary’s Dream,” “Mary’s Soliloquy”), otherwise functioning as a receptacle from which doctors pull rabbits, or pieces of rabbit. Ultimately, this is a novel that attempts to illuminate “the slippery nature of truth,” when everything from God to reality is up for grabs.
Deft, droll, and provocatively philosophical, a novel about how much we don’t know about what we think we know.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87193-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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