Captures the rhythms of family life but isn’t distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd.
For his third novel (The Colour of Heaven, 2003, etc.), British filmmaker and theater director Runcie chronicles the life and loves of an ordinary Englishman.
Martin Turner is a mere child in 1953 when a deadly storm ravages his island in the Thames estuary. His home is flooded and his beloved mother killed; his fisherman father Len, out dancing with his Aunt Violet, is spared. Throughout the novel Runcie crosscuts among six narrators, and the device works smoothly enough, especially in conveying the horror of the storm. His mother’s death will shape Martin’s character, making him fearful of the sudden loss of love, and his ambitions. “I’m going to stop water,” the boy declares, and he later becomes a water engineer, specializing in coastal erosion. His solitary childhood is supervised by grumpy Len and overbearing Violet, too busy romancing each other to cater to the child’s needs. Things look up in adolescence when his neighbor Linda shows him the wonders of sex; the young lovers break up when Martin becomes a student at Cambridge, where he falls in love with fellow student Claire, to whom he proposes over a Sunday lunch with her family. His character could have used more bold strokes, for Martin makes a poor catalyst for the story, which despite many good touches (smart, credible dialogue; a keen eye for class differences) is hollow at the center. Martin and Claire have a daughter, Lucy. In 1983 the feminist Claire camps out with Lucy at a months-long, women-only, anti-nuke protest. Feeling abandoned, Martin briefly returns to Linda, then reconciles with Claire; he’s less a heel than a ditherer. Here the novel runs out of steam; skeletons concerning Martin’s paternity and an abortion stay in the closet. The wrap-up has Martin attending his dying father.
Captures the rhythms of family life but isn’t distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-293-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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