Not even a writer of McCall Smith’s benevolence can provide a happy ending for every character who deserves it here. But he...
The creator of Mma Precious Ramotswe and chronicler of 44 Scotland St. (A Time of Love and Tartan, 2018, etc.) spins a heartwarming tale of love won and lost and won again during and after World War II.
Valerie Eliot, a member of the Women’s Land Army assigned to help out at Archie Wilkinson’s farm, falls in love with American pilot Mike Rogers, and he with her. They get engaged and she gets pregnant, though not in that order, but then Mike gets shot down over occupied Holland together with his unnamed navigator and their mascot, Peter Woodhouse, a sheepdog. Even as Val is painfully schooling herself to relinquish the flickering hope that her bridegroom is still alive, Mike, his navigator, and Peter Woodhouse are rescued by sympathetic locals and improbably protected by Cpl. Karl "Ubi" Dietrich, an occupying officer unsympathetic to the war who thinks its end is so near that there’s no point in killing them or turning them in. The end of the war that Ubi has so accurately forecast sends Mike and Peter Woodhouse back to Val in what would feel like a happy ending if it didn’t come at the story’s halfway point, but a surprising number of tests and tribulations still await Val, Mike, Ubi, and Peter Woodhouse. Indeed, this is one of the author’s most resolutely plotted novels since his rewriting of Emma (2015): although the characters display limited possibilities for development, the postwar world proves quite as challenging, and as generous in the opportunities it offers for love and courage and forgiveness, as the world at war.
Not even a writer of McCall Smith’s benevolence can provide a happy ending for every character who deserves it here. But he leaves you thinking that they’ve each had a bite of the apple and that all in all, that’s a pretty wonderful gift to have been granted.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4753-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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