Two intriguing storylines that, like feuding family members, have a hard time talking to one another.
An anthropologist explores a cargo cult in Papua New Guinea while her family back in Ireland struggles with a shocking revelation.
Liz, the hero of Laird’s third novel (Glover’s Mistake, 2009, etc.), is an academic who’s unlucky in love; as the story opens she’s caught her boyfriend with another man. Luckily, she’s written a successful book that gives a self-help twist to Claude Levi-Strauss’ theories about human behavior, which affords her a chance to escape New York to the Pacific island to host a BBC documentary about the founder of the Story, a quasi-Christian cult. First, though, she needs to visit her hometown in Ireland, where her sister, Allison, is getting married again. Her first husband was an abuser, but only after the nuptials does everybody discover that her second, Stephen, is worse: he was a shooter in an Irish Republican Army terrorist attack on a bar that killed five people. The novel alternates from Ireland to PNG, and there are some clear surface parallels: the home of the Story is called New Ulster, and Belef, the leader of the cargo cult, is in a dispute with the local mainline Christian group that echoes the Catholic-Protestant split during the Troubles. But the novel still feels like two tonally different novels imperfectly stitched together, one a Paul Theroux–esque exploration of a foreign land from an outsider perspective, the other a more Anne Enright–ish domestic study mainly concerned with Allison pressing Stephen to reckon with his past. Only occasionally does Laird oversell the connection between the two threads (“This family is like a cult we all follow but nobody remembers why!” Allison exclaims). But though faith and family remain topic A throughout, the dramas and circumstances on Ireland and PNG are so different that the connection feels forced.
Two intriguing storylines that, like feuding family members, have a hard time talking to one another.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-670-02514-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
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
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