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Lady Jane Grey (1537 - 1554) was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England and reigned as uncrowned queen regnant of the Kingdom of England for nine days in July 1553. Though Jane's accession to the thone was codified by King Edward VI, many felt that her reign in fact breached the English laws of succession.
The Protestant powers of the land did prove willing to accept Lady Jane Grey as Queen of England, even if only as part of a power-struggle to stop Henry's elder daughter, Princess Mary, a Roman Catholic, from acceding to the throne. Jane's brief rule ended, however, when the authorities revoked her proclamation as queen, and subsequently Mary had her executed for treason.
Alison Weir's historical novel, told from multiple view points, passionately recounts Jane's sheltered childhood, her troubled homelife, her penchant for learning, and eventually her ascendency to the reluctant Queen where this girl of "of privileged royal blood" becomes a pawn in the machinations of the aspiring noblemen and conniving ladies, a wager for the great aristocratic families of the time.
In an age where a male heir is considered paramount, Jane grows older feeling somewhat like a fish out of water. Her parents the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset are far more concerned with seeing Jane married off to a wealthy aristocrat, perhaps even to Edward, the future King and the son of Henry who will one day need a wife. For them, God has sent their daughter for a reason, which is to bring a different kind of glory upon the house of Dorset.
In this era where marriage is a political bargain and an opportunity to enrich associations with the royal court, Jane finds a kindly adviser in Katherine Parr, who after Henry's death retires to a life of comfort and security. Together with her new husband, Thomas Seymour, Katherine tries to give Jane a measure of comfort and security that has previously been denied to her by her officious and overbearing parents.
Encouraged by Katherine who is quickly and secretly adhering to the Protestant faith, Jane discovers a new way of looking at religion, her radical ideas and openly heretical views viewed as a counterpoint to the rigid Catholicism that still permeates much of the Kingdom.
Meanwhile, the battle begins to heat up over "the monstrous idol of Rome" and the opportunity by the Protestants to rid the Church of England of every last vestige of popery. And it is in this environment that Jane must learn to live in a world where the "walls have ears and the penalty for heresy is burnings."
Jane is constantly astonished at her parent's willingness to use her as barter in order to bring out her family influence and greatness. When the King's new Lord Protector, the Earl of Northumberland, arranges for Jane to marry Edward, Jane is placed as a possible candidate for Queen. After all, Jane is a Princess of blood, who must frame her mind towards marriage and the crown, forever accepting the path that God means her to follow.
But the marriage soon falls through and Jane finds herself caught up in the maneuverings of the court as the order of succession is manipulated to give Jane the best possible chance of becoming Queen in her own right. Forever the reluctant Princess, this poor young girl finds herself thrust into a situation not of her own making as she is forced to into a life-threatening showdown with Mary 1, a fanatical Catholic and whom many consider to be the rightful heir to the throne of England.
With remarkable insight Author Alison Weir gets right to the heart of Jane's life, ultimately shedding some much needed light on this enigmatic and misunderstood girl who is determined to resist under any circumstances becoming a party to treason.
This is Weir's first foray into fiction, so the novel suffers a bit and doesn't flow as easily as it should. Still, her characters are always wonderfully wrought and totally multifaceted and her recounting of the plots, counter-plots and interminable political trickery is always fascinating to read. Jane readily admits that she's not the stuff of which martyrs are made, but she has been born into the family of the royal house, where power, rank, wealth, and duties and obligations are of the utmost importance; consequently she must be above reproach.
In the end, Jane is portrayed as an intelligent and thoughtful girl, who ultimately finds herself cruelly used by those around her, a sufferer of circumstance and an innocent victim of a time where unending royal privilege doesn't necessarily guarantee a life of luxury free from the horrible outcome of the chopping block. Mike Leonard March 07
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(8 of 13 readers found this comment helpful)
Haunting and intimate, Jon McGregor's soulful second novel recounts one man's journey to discover his past. David Carter has spent most of his adult life troubled by his present and by the mother that he never knew. As the novel begins with Mary, a lonely young Irish girl, who abandons her home in Donegal and travels to England to apprentice herself as a domestic on the eve of the Second World War.
Intent to be invisible as only a servant can, Mary keeps her head down and learns to go about her daily business "so that everyone could pretend you weren't even there." She works hard at saving money to take back to her family, and her days filled with silent, passive routine, but for Mary it isn’t always easy to be invisible.
Mary cannot help but catch the eye of her employer and eventually she gets pregnant. She ends up having the baby at a local London hospital and then mysteriously vanishes; perhaps back to Ireland, her circumstances typical of the way it always happened in those days, "unfortunate pregnancies kept a secret, or else ignored, unstated, and in some cases, even denied."
More to the heart of the novel is David's story. David has attempted to build a life for himself and his Scottish wife Eleanor in Coventry after his parents left London at the end of the war. As a child, David, becomes an avid collector of bric-a-brac, spurred on by the fact that he never really knows much about his family or where he grew up, or what happened in the war and what his mother went through at home when the bombing was going on.
Encouraged by his adopted Aunt Julia who takes him to various museums, David develops an interest in history, "the same thrill of old stories made new." And as an adult, he obtains employment as Curatorial Assistant Coventry's Municipal Art Gallery and Museum where he immerses himself in the exhibitions and detritus of the past, looking after these physical traces of history, with their density of memory and time.
When Aunt Julia however, is hospitalized with Alzheimer's disease, she divulges a terrible secret, which shakes David's insular world to the very core. The story is simple enough, when Julia and David's mother Dorothy were working as nurses during the War, there was a girl and she had a baby she wasn't supposed to have, she gave the care of the baby to someone else, and then she suddenly disappeared.
This realization catapults David into a situation that unravels all of his confidence and self-assurance. But as he struggles to cope with the realities of his past, he must also manage Eleanor's sudden depression, thrust into the role of shouldering his wife's disappointments over the failure of her academic hopes. David soon learns that the real story about his past is far more complicated than anything he can gather together in a pair of photo albums and a scrapbook.
The need for David to know becomes an insatiable hunger, with weeks and months going by when he can think of nothing else, can hear nothing else, except of course Julia's startling comment, "of course we never did see the poor girl again." As David's long-lost mother becomes representative of all of his joys and failures at life and McGregor paints his protagonist as constantly caught in an emotional dilemma, Eleanor on the one side, Dorothy on the other, and the ghost of Mary constantly washing over him.
Drenched in English post war period detail and exquisitely written, So Many Ways to Begin is all about the small joys of life and about how our lives can be often changed and moved by much smaller cues such as chance meetings and overheard conversations, often at a moments notice. Life here is constantly altered and readjusted, always attuned to the course of things, "history is made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record." Mike Leonard March 07.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(8 of 15 readers found this comment helpful)
With its palpable sense of tension and with author Chris Bohjalian's trademark nuanced focus, The Double Bind weaves the classic novel The Great Gatsby, into a compelling story that involves the plight of the homeless, the ramifications of schizophrenia and the aftermath of a violent assault, the disfiguring emotional effects of which reverberate on one girl for years.
The young Laurel Estabrook isn't prepared for tragedy, yet it strikes her randomly, altering her life forever. Brutally attacked by while biking in the bucolic Underhill in the Vermont Countryside, Laurel survives being raped, but is physically and emotionally scarred by the experience.
Laurel gropes blindly through the days immediately following the assault, trying to return to some kind of normalcy. Eventually she goes on to college, which leads her to working in BEDS, a homeless shelter in Burlington where she meets the fifty-six year old transient Bobbie Crocker.
Bobbie has a collection of dog-eared badly preserved, photographs, with the faces were clearly recognizable, as well as jazz musicians, sculptors, and people playing chess in Washington Square. Laurel notices they're a few more recent ones from Underhill, including some of a dirt road and one with a girl on a bike.
In one photo Laurel recognizes instantly the home of Pamela Buchanan Marshfield and the country club from her childhood, including the Norman-like tower owned by a bootlegger named Gatsby and in another one, there's a young boy with his sister which Laurel presumes is Bobby Crocker himself. But if Pamela did have a brother, how could he have wound up homeless and mentally ill in Vermont?
Laurel tries to make sense of the box of dingy pictures while her boss wants to give Bobbie what he deserved, an exhibition highlighting Crocker's photographs, reminding the city that the homeless are people too, and have talents and dreams and accomplishments. But Laurel's curiosity is piqued when she discovers that Bobby was taking photos for Life Magazine and that he had a close association with another famous photographer who also worked for Life.
She becomes most fixated, however, over the photo of the girl on the bike and intrigued by the odd coincidence that Bobbie Crocker had owned pictures of the country club of her youth. Meanwhile, her best friend Talia and her older boyfriend, the emotionally indifferent David, begin to question Laurel's interest in Bobby Crocker.
Laurel is gradually seduced by the secrets of the Buchanan's and their ties to the Gatsby's, becoming increasingly paranoid when Pamela Buchanan expresses an interest in getting her hands on the photos. She sees Bobby's work as a deluded and malicious attempt to expose the Buchanan family secrets and has spent a not insubstantial part of her life trying to salvage her parents' reputation, shuddering when she imagines what sort of truth might be conjured from among her brother's old photos.
Bohjalian steadily builds the pressure, unraveling the complex mystery of how Bobby went from the mansion across from Laurel's childhood swim club to a dirt road and then to a homeless shelter in northern Vermont. Along the way, the author perfectly captures Laurel's sense of obsession and vulnerability, and also her desperate need for reassurance as she tries to unlock the mystery of Bobby Crocker's photographic legacy.
The final revelations are indeed startling, and indeed threw this reader for a loop. Bobby certainly had his own devils, but the word "devil" also comes to haunt Laurel, who along with all the other worlds that had dogged her for years, finally understands how a forgiving memory is perhaps the only way to get by and also how one family can be single handedly capable of so much delusion, distortion and disdain. Mike Leonard March 07.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(7 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
The poor Matthieu Zela is at his wits end. His twenty-two-year old nephew Tommy, a hugely popular English television celebrity, just can't look after himself, spending most of his days living on the edge, snorting cocaine and partying to all hours of the morning. Indeed Matthiew fears that Tommy may go the way of Tommy's ancestors, everyone one of whom has met with an unhappy ending.
Matthieu is all too familiar with the various generations of Thomas's as his lineage has always been troublesome. Born in 1743 in Paris, Matthieu seems to have always had a nephew tagging along beside him. Now over 250 years old, Matthieu is well aware of the winds of change, each era in history providing a window of learning for this talented media entrepreneur who over the centuries has courted the rich and famous and witnessed some of the most defining moments of three centuries.
In 1758 the fifteen-year-old Matthieu escapes Paris for Dover, after his stepfather horribly murders his mother. Matthieu takes his five-year-old brother Tomas and his older companion, the lovely Dominique Sauvet, a girl whom he meets on the voyage over. Many adventures await them, as Matthieu struggles to make a life for himself in this new country.
But the biggest surprise is that in 1793 the process begins which was to make him truly "a thief of time," and he stops the physical aspects of aging. At first Matthieu is shocked, but as he lives on, he realizes that this kind of enforced longevity perhaps isn't that bad after all. Life continually leads him in completely different and unexpected directions, and what could have begun to unravel, ends up in fact being a life well lived, filled with murder, betrayal, marriage and romance.
Drifting somewhere between fiction and the totally absurd, The Thief of Time makes some fun observations about the last couple of centuries as Matthieu's path veers from a seventeenth century stable boy to a nineteenth century industrialist to a respectable, twentieth century media entrepreneur.
Over the hundreds of years, Mathieu's personal life indeed becomes complicated. There are failed marriages, and women who blend together and separate, and then there's the problem of what to do about his nephews, "256 years old and he's sat back and watched nine of the Thomas's die and done nothing at all to prevent any of these tragedies."
Fortunately, our hero is exceptionally bright, usually one step ahead of everyone else. Boyne moves his plot along at break-neck speed, weaving his time-traveling adventure tale and immersing the reader into these different eras of history.
My problem with this novel is that Matthieu often comes across as a blank slate and rather one dimensional; we never really get to the heart of what makes this 256-year-old man tick. Matthieu's encounters with different periods of history are always interesting, but for all its predilections towards an historical adventure novel and all the drama and behind-the-scenes machinations, the Thief of Time, and indeed Matthiew himself, ends up being a bit flat and perfunctory. Mike Leonard March 07.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(6 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)
Steeping his novel in saintly history, yet anchoring his characters resolutely in the modern world, author Liam Callanan's All Saints is all about one woman's realization that life just isn't a bed of roses. Getting right to the heart of her psyche, Callanan explores the rickety life of Emily Hamilton, a cynical and chain-smoking teacher at a prestigious All Saints Catholic school in Newport Beach, California.
The victim of life's hard knocks; Emily has held on fast to her Christian faith, whilst also having a matter-of-fact attitude about the life and the word around her. Using the classroom as her court, she tries to get the students interested in church history, peppering her diatribes with large doses of irony, while pondering on the concepts of saints and popes.
Riddled with the rituals of dominance, almost a like pre-ordained pecking order, the good fathers who run the school are mostly all members of an obscure, dwindling society named order of Saint Andrew. Emily, for the most part, keeps herself out of the affairs of the fathers that is until she attracts the attention of Edgar, a young handsome rapscallion who appears in her class.
The eighteen-year-old Edgar who looks nineteen and acts seventeen, is the unofficial beautiful student, and immediately attracts Emily's eyes as she finds herself increasingly attracted to him. Although she sees herself as a failure in marriage, Emily is certainly no shrinking violet and she eagerly fantasizes about having a love affair with this striking young man who comes to her ever more frequently.
Edgar is indeed smart, articulate, considerate and mature, and she ends up giving him "whole days of my precious life." Emily confides with the ailing Father Martin Dimanche, this slight man with thinning grey hair who becomes her partner in crime as they furtively swap cigarettes with each other high atop the school's beachside steeple.
"You know, there's nothing more sensual than smoking," says Emily with their discussions ranging from the philosophical to the religious, driving them both to see the soul and blight of each day. It is here that we learn of Emily's three marriages and her childhood miscarriage, where she went almost berserk, hysterical and self-destructive, and also find out about Martin's terrible secret, which sends up shaking Emily's faith in herself and in those around her.
Emily is all too willing to paint Edgar as the provocateur in the affair, yet she sees herself as kissing both Paul – Edgar's best friend - and even Martin, who seems to strangely hold a romantic flame for her. A black comedy, All Saints is part mystery and part love story, a witty and sardonic diatribe on faith and the modern world where the contradictions of religion and superstition are often a common confusion to people like Emily.
From the moment Emily steps into the battle at All Saints she seems to become involved in an intense and even mordant battle of wits, questioning her life in matters of kissing and courage, "all I have to do is look at the backs of my hands to remember how old I am." As Callanan propels his narrative along with an unexpected suicide, a teenage pregnancy and a series of heartbreaking confessionals, Emily ends up learning some hard lessons about her murky belief system.
That she has gone through so much and come out relatively unscathed while maintaining her sense of humor is shock even though she's managed to alienate every friend she's ever had, and divorce every husband. Although Emily faces some bitter truths about age and ageing, she's is also a survivor, a fine example of one woman's capacity for forgiveness. Mike Leonard March 07.
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(6 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)
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Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey by Alison Weir
Mikeonalpha, April 4, 2007
Lady Jane Grey (1537 - 1554) was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England and reigned as uncrowned queen regnant of the Kingdom of England for nine days in July 1553. Though Jane's accession to the thone was codified by King Edward VI, many felt that her reign in fact breached the English laws of succession.The Protestant powers of the land did prove willing to accept Lady Jane Grey as Queen of England, even if only as part of a power-struggle to stop Henry's elder daughter, Princess Mary, a Roman Catholic, from acceding to the throne. Jane's brief rule ended, however, when the authorities revoked her proclamation as queen, and subsequently Mary had her executed for treason.
Alison Weir's historical novel, told from multiple view points, passionately recounts Jane's sheltered childhood, her troubled homelife, her penchant for learning, and eventually her ascendency to the reluctant Queen where this girl of "of privileged royal blood" becomes a pawn in the machinations of the aspiring noblemen and conniving ladies, a wager for the great aristocratic families of the time.
In an age where a male heir is considered paramount, Jane grows older feeling somewhat like a fish out of water. Her parents the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset are far more concerned with seeing Jane married off to a wealthy aristocrat, perhaps even to Edward, the future King and the son of Henry who will one day need a wife. For them, God has sent their daughter for a reason, which is to bring a different kind of glory upon the house of Dorset.
In this era where marriage is a political bargain and an opportunity to enrich associations with the royal court, Jane finds a kindly adviser in Katherine Parr, who after Henry's death retires to a life of comfort and security. Together with her new husband, Thomas Seymour, Katherine tries to give Jane a measure of comfort and security that has previously been denied to her by her officious and overbearing parents.
Encouraged by Katherine who is quickly and secretly adhering to the Protestant faith, Jane discovers a new way of looking at religion, her radical ideas and openly heretical views viewed as a counterpoint to the rigid Catholicism that still permeates much of the Kingdom.
Meanwhile, the battle begins to heat up over "the monstrous idol of Rome" and the opportunity by the Protestants to rid the Church of England of every last vestige of popery. And it is in this environment that Jane must learn to live in a world where the "walls have ears and the penalty for heresy is burnings."
Jane is constantly astonished at her parent's willingness to use her as barter in order to bring out her family influence and greatness. When the King's new Lord Protector, the Earl of Northumberland, arranges for Jane to marry Edward, Jane is placed as a possible candidate for Queen. After all, Jane is a Princess of blood, who must frame her mind towards marriage and the crown, forever accepting the path that God means her to follow.
But the marriage soon falls through and Jane finds herself caught up in the maneuverings of the court as the order of succession is manipulated to give Jane the best possible chance of becoming Queen in her own right. Forever the reluctant Princess, this poor young girl finds herself thrust into a situation not of her own making as she is forced to into a life-threatening showdown with Mary 1, a fanatical Catholic and whom many consider to be the rightful heir to the throne of England.
With remarkable insight Author Alison Weir gets right to the heart of Jane's life, ultimately shedding some much needed light on this enigmatic and misunderstood girl who is determined to resist under any circumstances becoming a party to treason.
This is Weir's first foray into fiction, so the novel suffers a bit and doesn't flow as easily as it should. Still, her characters are always wonderfully wrought and totally multifaceted and her recounting of the plots, counter-plots and interminable political trickery is always fascinating to read. Jane readily admits that she's not the stuff of which martyrs are made, but she has been born into the family of the royal house, where power, rank, wealth, and duties and obligations are of the utmost importance; consequently she must be above reproach.
In the end, Jane is portrayed as an intelligent and thoughtful girl, who ultimately finds herself cruelly used by those around her, a sufferer of circumstance and an innocent victim of a time where unending royal privilege doesn't necessarily guarantee a life of luxury free from the horrible outcome of the chopping block. Mike Leonard March 07
(8 of 13 readers found this comment helpful)
So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor
Mikeonalpha, March 26, 2007
Haunting and intimate, Jon McGregor's soulful second novel recounts one man's journey to discover his past. David Carter has spent most of his adult life troubled by his present and by the mother that he never knew. As the novel begins with Mary, a lonely young Irish girl, who abandons her home in Donegal and travels to England to apprentice herself as a domestic on the eve of the Second World War.Intent to be invisible as only a servant can, Mary keeps her head down and learns to go about her daily business "so that everyone could pretend you weren't even there." She works hard at saving money to take back to her family, and her days filled with silent, passive routine, but for Mary it isn’t always easy to be invisible.
Mary cannot help but catch the eye of her employer and eventually she gets pregnant. She ends up having the baby at a local London hospital and then mysteriously vanishes; perhaps back to Ireland, her circumstances typical of the way it always happened in those days, "unfortunate pregnancies kept a secret, or else ignored, unstated, and in some cases, even denied."
More to the heart of the novel is David's story. David has attempted to build a life for himself and his Scottish wife Eleanor in Coventry after his parents left London at the end of the war. As a child, David, becomes an avid collector of bric-a-brac, spurred on by the fact that he never really knows much about his family or where he grew up, or what happened in the war and what his mother went through at home when the bombing was going on.
Encouraged by his adopted Aunt Julia who takes him to various museums, David develops an interest in history, "the same thrill of old stories made new." And as an adult, he obtains employment as Curatorial Assistant Coventry's Municipal Art Gallery and Museum where he immerses himself in the exhibitions and detritus of the past, looking after these physical traces of history, with their density of memory and time.
When Aunt Julia however, is hospitalized with Alzheimer's disease, she divulges a terrible secret, which shakes David's insular world to the very core. The story is simple enough, when Julia and David's mother Dorothy were working as nurses during the War, there was a girl and she had a baby she wasn't supposed to have, she gave the care of the baby to someone else, and then she suddenly disappeared.
This realization catapults David into a situation that unravels all of his confidence and self-assurance. But as he struggles to cope with the realities of his past, he must also manage Eleanor's sudden depression, thrust into the role of shouldering his wife's disappointments over the failure of her academic hopes. David soon learns that the real story about his past is far more complicated than anything he can gather together in a pair of photo albums and a scrapbook.
The need for David to know becomes an insatiable hunger, with weeks and months going by when he can think of nothing else, can hear nothing else, except of course Julia's startling comment, "of course we never did see the poor girl again." As David's long-lost mother becomes representative of all of his joys and failures at life and McGregor paints his protagonist as constantly caught in an emotional dilemma, Eleanor on the one side, Dorothy on the other, and the ghost of Mary constantly washing over him.
Drenched in English post war period detail and exquisitely written, So Many Ways to Begin is all about the small joys of life and about how our lives can be often changed and moved by much smaller cues such as chance meetings and overheard conversations, often at a moments notice. Life here is constantly altered and readjusted, always attuned to the course of things, "history is made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record." Mike Leonard March 07.
(8 of 15 readers found this comment helpful)
The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian
Mikeonalpha, March 19, 2007
With its palpable sense of tension and with author Chris Bohjalian's trademark nuanced focus, The Double Bind weaves the classic novel The Great Gatsby, into a compelling story that involves the plight of the homeless, the ramifications of schizophrenia and the aftermath of a violent assault, the disfiguring emotional effects of which reverberate on one girl for years.The young Laurel Estabrook isn't prepared for tragedy, yet it strikes her randomly, altering her life forever. Brutally attacked by while biking in the bucolic Underhill in the Vermont Countryside, Laurel survives being raped, but is physically and emotionally scarred by the experience.
Laurel gropes blindly through the days immediately following the assault, trying to return to some kind of normalcy. Eventually she goes on to college, which leads her to working in BEDS, a homeless shelter in Burlington where she meets the fifty-six year old transient Bobbie Crocker.
Bobbie has a collection of dog-eared badly preserved, photographs, with the faces were clearly recognizable, as well as jazz musicians, sculptors, and people playing chess in Washington Square. Laurel notices they're a few more recent ones from Underhill, including some of a dirt road and one with a girl on a bike.
In one photo Laurel recognizes instantly the home of Pamela Buchanan Marshfield and the country club from her childhood, including the Norman-like tower owned by a bootlegger named Gatsby and in another one, there's a young boy with his sister which Laurel presumes is Bobby Crocker himself. But if Pamela did have a brother, how could he have wound up homeless and mentally ill in Vermont?
Laurel tries to make sense of the box of dingy pictures while her boss wants to give Bobbie what he deserved, an exhibition highlighting Crocker's photographs, reminding the city that the homeless are people too, and have talents and dreams and accomplishments. But Laurel's curiosity is piqued when she discovers that Bobby was taking photos for Life Magazine and that he had a close association with another famous photographer who also worked for Life.
She becomes most fixated, however, over the photo of the girl on the bike and intrigued by the odd coincidence that Bobbie Crocker had owned pictures of the country club of her youth. Meanwhile, her best friend Talia and her older boyfriend, the emotionally indifferent David, begin to question Laurel's interest in Bobby Crocker.
Laurel is gradually seduced by the secrets of the Buchanan's and their ties to the Gatsby's, becoming increasingly paranoid when Pamela Buchanan expresses an interest in getting her hands on the photos. She sees Bobby's work as a deluded and malicious attempt to expose the Buchanan family secrets and has spent a not insubstantial part of her life trying to salvage her parents' reputation, shuddering when she imagines what sort of truth might be conjured from among her brother's old photos.
Bohjalian steadily builds the pressure, unraveling the complex mystery of how Bobby went from the mansion across from Laurel's childhood swim club to a dirt road and then to a homeless shelter in northern Vermont. Along the way, the author perfectly captures Laurel's sense of obsession and vulnerability, and also her desperate need for reassurance as she tries to unlock the mystery of Bobby Crocker's photographic legacy.
The final revelations are indeed startling, and indeed threw this reader for a loop. Bobby certainly had his own devils, but the word "devil" also comes to haunt Laurel, who along with all the other worlds that had dogged her for years, finally understands how a forgiving memory is perhaps the only way to get by and also how one family can be single handedly capable of so much delusion, distortion and disdain. Mike Leonard March 07.
(7 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
The Thief of Time by John Boyne
Mikeonalpha, March 15, 2007
The poor Matthieu Zela is at his wits end. His twenty-two-year old nephew Tommy, a hugely popular English television celebrity, just can't look after himself, spending most of his days living on the edge, snorting cocaine and partying to all hours of the morning. Indeed Matthiew fears that Tommy may go the way of Tommy's ancestors, everyone one of whom has met with an unhappy ending.Matthieu is all too familiar with the various generations of Thomas's as his lineage has always been troublesome. Born in 1743 in Paris, Matthieu seems to have always had a nephew tagging along beside him. Now over 250 years old, Matthieu is well aware of the winds of change, each era in history providing a window of learning for this talented media entrepreneur who over the centuries has courted the rich and famous and witnessed some of the most defining moments of three centuries.
In 1758 the fifteen-year-old Matthieu escapes Paris for Dover, after his stepfather horribly murders his mother. Matthieu takes his five-year-old brother Tomas and his older companion, the lovely Dominique Sauvet, a girl whom he meets on the voyage over. Many adventures await them, as Matthieu struggles to make a life for himself in this new country.
But the biggest surprise is that in 1793 the process begins which was to make him truly "a thief of time," and he stops the physical aspects of aging. At first Matthieu is shocked, but as he lives on, he realizes that this kind of enforced longevity perhaps isn't that bad after all. Life continually leads him in completely different and unexpected directions, and what could have begun to unravel, ends up in fact being a life well lived, filled with murder, betrayal, marriage and romance.
Drifting somewhere between fiction and the totally absurd, The Thief of Time makes some fun observations about the last couple of centuries as Matthieu's path veers from a seventeenth century stable boy to a nineteenth century industrialist to a respectable, twentieth century media entrepreneur.
Over the hundreds of years, Mathieu's personal life indeed becomes complicated. There are failed marriages, and women who blend together and separate, and then there's the problem of what to do about his nephews, "256 years old and he's sat back and watched nine of the Thomas's die and done nothing at all to prevent any of these tragedies."
Fortunately, our hero is exceptionally bright, usually one step ahead of everyone else. Boyne moves his plot along at break-neck speed, weaving his time-traveling adventure tale and immersing the reader into these different eras of history.
My problem with this novel is that Matthieu often comes across as a blank slate and rather one dimensional; we never really get to the heart of what makes this 256-year-old man tick. Matthieu's encounters with different periods of history are always interesting, but for all its predilections towards an historical adventure novel and all the drama and behind-the-scenes machinations, the Thief of Time, and indeed Matthiew himself, ends up being a bit flat and perfunctory. Mike Leonard March 07.
(6 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)
All Saints by Liam Callanan
Mikeonalpha, March 12, 2007
Steeping his novel in saintly history, yet anchoring his characters resolutely in the modern world, author Liam Callanan's All Saints is all about one woman's realization that life just isn't a bed of roses. Getting right to the heart of her psyche, Callanan explores the rickety life of Emily Hamilton, a cynical and chain-smoking teacher at a prestigious All Saints Catholic school in Newport Beach, California.The victim of life's hard knocks; Emily has held on fast to her Christian faith, whilst also having a matter-of-fact attitude about the life and the word around her. Using the classroom as her court, she tries to get the students interested in church history, peppering her diatribes with large doses of irony, while pondering on the concepts of saints and popes.
Riddled with the rituals of dominance, almost a like pre-ordained pecking order, the good fathers who run the school are mostly all members of an obscure, dwindling society named order of Saint Andrew. Emily, for the most part, keeps herself out of the affairs of the fathers that is until she attracts the attention of Edgar, a young handsome rapscallion who appears in her class.
The eighteen-year-old Edgar who looks nineteen and acts seventeen, is the unofficial beautiful student, and immediately attracts Emily's eyes as she finds herself increasingly attracted to him. Although she sees herself as a failure in marriage, Emily is certainly no shrinking violet and she eagerly fantasizes about having a love affair with this striking young man who comes to her ever more frequently.
Edgar is indeed smart, articulate, considerate and mature, and she ends up giving him "whole days of my precious life." Emily confides with the ailing Father Martin Dimanche, this slight man with thinning grey hair who becomes her partner in crime as they furtively swap cigarettes with each other high atop the school's beachside steeple.
"You know, there's nothing more sensual than smoking," says Emily with their discussions ranging from the philosophical to the religious, driving them both to see the soul and blight of each day. It is here that we learn of Emily's three marriages and her childhood miscarriage, where she went almost berserk, hysterical and self-destructive, and also find out about Martin's terrible secret, which sends up shaking Emily's faith in herself and in those around her.
Emily is all too willing to paint Edgar as the provocateur in the affair, yet she sees herself as kissing both Paul – Edgar's best friend - and even Martin, who seems to strangely hold a romantic flame for her. A black comedy, All Saints is part mystery and part love story, a witty and sardonic diatribe on faith and the modern world where the contradictions of religion and superstition are often a common confusion to people like Emily.
From the moment Emily steps into the battle at All Saints she seems to become involved in an intense and even mordant battle of wits, questioning her life in matters of kissing and courage, "all I have to do is look at the backs of my hands to remember how old I am." As Callanan propels his narrative along with an unexpected suicide, a teenage pregnancy and a series of heartbreaking confessionals, Emily ends up learning some hard lessons about her murky belief system.
That she has gone through so much and come out relatively unscathed while maintaining her sense of humor is shock even though she's managed to alienate every friend she's ever had, and divorce every husband. Although Emily faces some bitter truths about age and ageing, she's is also a survivor, a fine example of one woman's capacity for forgiveness. Mike Leonard March 07.
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