Not a failure—it’s a worthy successor to Richard Powers’s similarly time-shifting novel, Gain—but its seams occasionally...
The death of a prominent but scandalized scholar prompts a search for a photographic record of early Toronto in Redhill’s second novel (Martin Sloane, 2002), in which narrative leaps between the 19th and 20th centuries.
When David Hollis, wracked by Lou Gehrig’s disease, committed suicide in the summer of 1997, he left behind a broken reputation. Shortly before dying, the “forensic geologist” authored a monograph claiming that a ship buried in the heart of downtown Toronto contained photographs of the entire city in the 1850s, but his refusal to show the diary he cited as evidence sparked accusations that he made up the whole thing. Hoping to rescue his honor, his grieving widow, Marianne, takes up residence in a hotel room overlooking the parcel of land where the photos are allegedly buried—and where a sports stadium is about to be built. High-strung and contentious, she regularly does battle with John, her daughter’s fiancé, the sole person who knows about her vigil. The book alternates between Marianne’s story and that of Jem Hallam, a pharmacist who moves to Toronto from England in 1855; after Hallam’s attempt to run an apothecary nearly bankrupts him (it turns out he purchased the shop from a man who accidentally caused three people to overdose), he becomes one of the city’s earliest and most prolific photographers. The Hallam sections feature the novel’s best-drawn characters, including Samuel Ennis, the entrepreneurial but ailing man who introduces Jem to the photo trade, and Claudia Rowe, a down-on-her-luck widow who becomes his assistant. Redhill’s descriptions of early Toronto are warmly romantic while still capturing a hard-bitten frontier-times attitude. The modern-day portions of the book are weaker by comparison—Marianne and John are relatively undernourished characters who often behave in ways that drive the plot but feel unnatural, which makes the concluding revelations feel underwhelming.
Not a failure—it’s a worthy successor to Richard Powers’s similarly time-shifting novel, Gain—but its seams occasionally show.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-73498-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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