BORDER CROSSING

Name: BORDER CROSSING
Author: Pat Barker
ISBN: 0-374-18115-2

by Pat Barker ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

Not one of Barker's triumphs. She's a gifted realist who usually excels at putting flesh on the bones of what might seem...

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A former child murderer's relationship with the psychologist whose testimony had assured his conviction and imprisonment is the core of this intriguing, melodramatic, and rather diffused eighth novel from the British author of the award-winning Regeneration Trilogy.

In fact the characters of Regeneration's wartime psychotherapist W.H.R. Rivers and his bisexual patient Billy Prior have clearly influenced those of this novel's protagonist, Tom Seymour, and morally opaque Danny Miller, whom Tom rescues from drowning without recognizing him (13 years after Danny, at age 10, had murdered an elderly woman neighbor)—in a striking opening scene dominated by ironic and disturbing images of childbirth. Barker works hard at portraying Seymour's innate decency, at odds with his personal failings (as a presumably infertile and inattentive husband) and his inability to grasp the quicksilver enigma of the adult Danny (now renamed "Ian Wilkinson"): brooding, paranoid, apparently deeply traumatized, yet alert and intelligent, sedulously pursuing informal "sessions" with Seymour (because "I simply want to know what happened and why"). Their meetings are balanced by scenes depicting both Tom's unraveling personal life and his investigative visits with people involved in Danny's past, his trial, and his (ostensible) rehabilitation—including a hard-bitten probation officer, a benign reform-school headmaster, and the male teacher accused of sexually abusing the adolescent Danny. Barker keeps it moving (the thriller element here is quite pronounced, though subordinated to the central patient-therapist relationship), and the story holds our interest, even if it does seem overindebted to both Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Barker's own earlier, superior fiction.

Not one of Barker's triumphs. She's a gifted realist who usually excels at putting flesh on the bones of what might seem mere case histories, but Border Crossing is really only a return visit to previously explored fictional territory.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-374-18115-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

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by Robert Harris

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V2
by Robert Harris

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.