A nice portrait of an interesting (and underappreciated) time and place.
An elegant and thoughtful historical set in 17th-century Maryland.
The Chesapeake State had one of the most colorful and turbulent histories of the original 13 colonies. Settled in 1634 by Lord Baltimore, it was originally intended as a haven for Catholics fleeing persecution in England, and a large proportion of its founding fathers were Catholic aristocrats and Jesuit missionaries. The first colony to permit the free exercise of religion, it inspired resentment among its (Protestant) neighbors and was invaded by Puritans, who expelled the Jesuits and forbade Catholicism. Karlin, whose sixth novel this is (Prisoners, 1998, etc.), presents a fairly large cast, but it’s representative: the adventurer James Hallam (by turns mercenary, carpenter, indentured servant, and aspiring politician); the black slave Ezekiel (born in Dahomey and transported to Barbados, where he spares his master’s life in a slave uprising and is forced to flee for his own); the Piscataway Indian Tawzin (kidnapped as a child and carried away to England, where he is baptized as John Christman and later returns to Maryland a devout Catholic); the Jesuit scholar and missionary Father White (exhausted from years of religious exile from his native England); the Jewish trader Jacob Lambroso (a friend of Tawzin and Ezekiel), and, in the background, the large and influential Calvert family (founders and first governors of the colony). Although larger historical currents are present, this is a story of private lives first, focussing on the tribulations of the individual characters (as when Tawzin is falsely accused of abducting his own wife and brought to trial), and it succeeds admirably in making their lives credible and interesting. While, particularly in Ezekiel’s sections (“I thought then that Tawzin loved Lombroso as a wise son does who forgives his father for seeing a dream in his son’s fallible flesh and forming spirit”), the language can be overblown, for the most part it’s quite readable.
A nice portrait of an interesting (and underappreciated) time and place.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-880684-89-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
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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