The rhetoric is gorgeous, but the pace is too often funereal. Not, therefore, one of West’s real triumphs—but a failure that...
West’s 19th novel (after OK and Dry Danube, both 2000) painstakingly fictionalizes the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators led by Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up Parliament, and in the process murder England’s anti-Catholic King James I and his chief ministers.
West focuses initially (and, throughout, primarily) on Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest hidden in the home of Catholic noblewoman Anne Vaux, in one of the elaborate recesses (“priestholes”) designed and constructed by Little John Owen, a master of “deceptive carpentry” whose willingness to undertake such work presumably relates to his own dwarfish near-invisibility (he’s “a miniature freak . . . a gnome of the shadows”). The story stalls for much of its first hundred pages, as West roves through the cloistered thought processes of: Father Garnet (also troubled by unwelcome sexual imaginings), Lady Vaux, and Owen—as well as composer William Byrd, an acquaintance of Father Garnet’s, whose music gains him entry to Catholic and Anglican circles alike. Things pick up when events overtake ruminations, ending in the capture of several conspirators, while West broadens his focus to include “Guido” Fawkes himself (who, under torture, names names and implicates others), royalist aristocrat (and, in effect, Lord High Executioner) Sir Robert Cecil, and Machiavellian King’s Attorney Sir Edward Coke. And the tale rises to real eloquence in its rich closing pages, where Father Garnet agonizes over the relative claims of violence and inaction, and prepares himself to die. West’s love of the high style is well-suited to “the seething rot of Elizabethan and Jacobean society”; one wishes only that his (rather arch) omniscient narrator had reined in his tendencies toward elegant variation and superfluous commentary.
The rhetoric is gorgeous, but the pace is too often funereal. Not, therefore, one of West’s real triumphs—but a failure that many novelists might well envy.Pub Date: May 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-8112-1467-2
Page Count: 340
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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