Readable and mildly engaging but lacking fresh insights into very familiar material.
Another historical novel from de Bernières (A Partisan’s Daughter, 2008, etc.): the agreeable, albeit predictable saga of an English family transformed by World War I.
It begins with the usual scene of prewar tranquility, in this case a 1902 coronation party in suburban London. Mr. and Mrs. McCosh, an investor/inventor and his eccentric wife, contentedly survey their four daughters. Beautiful Rosie, though only 12, already plans to marry the handsome boy next door, Ashbridge Pendennis. Somehow it seems inevitable, as the action jumps ahead 12 years and Ash announces that he’s enlisted immediately after becoming engaged to Rosie, that he won’t survive and will leave her grieving in a morbidly unhealthy way. Indeed, although a good portion of the book concerns the combat experiences of Ash in the infantry and Daniel Pitt, another London neighbor, in the Royal Flying Corps, its central subject is the adjustments everyone must make afterward. It’s not just veterans who miss the sense of purpose wartime service brought; Rosie’s sisters, who all did volunteer work, are both enticed and made restless by the expanded vistas for women that open after 1918. Their mother is horrified by this and every other postwar social change, described in the boilerplate passages de Bernières favors for scene-setting. Daniel waits patiently for Rosie to get over Ash, but that doesn’t happen even after they’re married. We get pretty tired of mopey Rosie, and although Christabel, Ottilie, and Sophie McCosh are livelier, each is a one-note outline—Christabel loves another woman, Ottilie is serenely mysterious, Sophie adorably misuses esoteric words—rather than a fully fleshed character. The large supporting cast is also sketched in broad strokes as the story moves forward, centered mostly on Rosie and Daniel. Their try for a new start in a new location, coupled with an abrupt ending and a hint in the author’s acknowledgments, suggests the McCoshes and kith will be making further appearances.
Readable and mildly engaging but lacking fresh insights into very familiar material.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-94648-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
