An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.
Better known as the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker in his day job as general manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre is the focus of Irish writer O’Connor’s atmospheric new novel.
Mind you, there are plenty of nods to his famous horror story, from a ghost in the theater’s attic named Mina to a scene-painter named Jonathan Harker, plus the fact that the dreaded vampire bears a more than passing resemblance to Stoker’s mercurial boss, legendary actor Henry Irving. Harker turns out to be a woman, a twist that suits the seething homoerotic currents between Stoker and Irving, who can also be found entwined in the naked arms of co-star Ellen Terry. Terry’s voice as recorded in 1906—funny, bitchy, extremely shrewd about her acting partner’s gifts and limitations—offers a welcome counterpoint to the sometimes overly dense third-person narrative of Stoker’s tenure at the Lyceum and on tour in the late 1870s and '80s, grappling with Irving’s neuroses while striving to snatch some time for his own writing. This is a tougher, colder work than Ghost Light (2011), O’Connor’s previous fictional excursion into theatrical lives, and that novel’s portrait of actor Molly Allgood’s love affair with playwright John Synge was gentler than this one of Stoker’s thorny relationship with Irving, a toxic blend of need, rage, resentment, and profound love. Still, the men’s bond is as moving and more unsettling, proof that, as Stoker later tells Harker, “Love is not a matter of who puts what where but of wanting only goodness and respectful kindliness for the loved one.” Irving seems less deserving of such kindness than Stoker’s assertive wife, Flo, who makes sure he gets copyright protection for the vampire story his boss cruelly dismisses as “filth and tedious rubbish from first to last.” Flo’s tender letter to Terry after Stoker’s death closes the novel, with another affirmation that “There are many kinds of love. I know that. He did, too.”
An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-593-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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