Dense and often funny, this reissue is necessary reading for fans of both Green and modernist fiction.
Green draws on his experience with the Auxiliary Fire Service in this intricate 1943 novel about waiting for and living through the London Blitz.
When Richard Roe joined up with the AFS, nine months before Britain entered WWII, he never expected war would really occur; when it does come, his company braces for raids but is met instead by near-endless tedium, packed into an overheated substation, playing workplace politics, waiting for hellfire to rain from the sky. Roe's situation is complicated by an incident involving his subofficer Pye's sister, who abducted Roe's son as he stood dazzled in the stained-glass light of a toy shop, "a permanence of sapphire in shopping hours." This is the merest taste of Green's descriptive spellcasting, his almost psychedelic sketches of varying qualities of light and the emotional, sensory, and psychological effects of color. With his sister confined to a psychiatric institution to avoid prosecution, Pye wonders, finally, if he played a part in her deteriorating mental state. Roe's wife and son, meanwhile, have been evacuated to his childhood home. He visits them infrequently, on a slow train scoring a line along which he makes a clean break between his existence in London, where he gives in to the frenzied lusts of wartime with Hilly, the station's mess manager, and his familial life in the country, where he is overwhelmed with love for his wife. The two seemingly disparate states are not at odds in his mind, true to Green's deep understanding of the protean, multilayered nature of human existence. Green's acrobatic syntax yields not an easy reading experience but a rewarding one, as he weaves multiple narratives over and through one another, reeling among perspective shifts, zigzagging through clouds of memory and conjecture. At last comes the final conflagration, which does not kill but consumes Roe, rising up in a blaze of heat and color, death and danger.
Dense and often funny, this reissue is necessary reading for fans of both Green and modernist fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781681370125
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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