Fails to Find New Land

The Pilgrims
by Will Elliott
Published by Tor

Reviewed by Amanda
2 Out of 5 Stars

**I received a free copy of The Pilgrims from Tor in exchange for an honest review.**

Ah, the fantasy quest novel. Been a while since we've bumped into each other, but, damn, we used to have some good times when I was a teenager. I swear you haven't changed a bit since the last time I ran into you. So, anything new with you? No, not really? Still just rambling off down the road to adventure, eh? Meet a mage or two, maybe some stone giants, a few angels? Choose some ordinary schmuck to save the world from an omnipotent evil overlord hellbent on world domination? So, nothing new in your bag of tricks? Well, it was good seeing you . . . maybe we can meet up again sometime and you can tell me the same predictable tale. No, no--don't call me, I'll call you. Take care now! Buh-bye.

Yeah, I'm a little jaded when it comes to the fantasy quest. Granted, I cut my teeth on this genre, so folks who are new to fantasy may enjoy this tale far more than I did. The only way I enjoy this type of novel these days is if it's a new, inventive twist on the standard journey through a world that is not our own. Unfortunately, The Pilgrims by Will Elliott never rises above the formulaic presentation of an unlikely hero going on an unlikely adventure.

Eric Albright and his homeless friend, Case, find themselves in a strange world after opening a door that appears on a London bridge. In this new world, Eric and Case have the instant ability to both understand and speak the languages of all its denizens. Joining a merry band of rebels against Vous, the man who would be a god, Eric and Case meander without much purpose, encounter all of the aforementioned creatures and then some, and do little to endear themselves to the reader. Eric becomes convinced that he's meant to be a savior--though does little to prove it other than occasionally picturing himself as Batman. While the fantasy world created by Elliott has some intriguing elements, they fail to stand out when surrounded by so many cliches. The characters themselves are also flat, especially Eric, who seems so at ease with this strange place and his role in it that the narrative loses the tension created by a character confused by and at odds with his new surroundings.

Another strike The Pilgrims has against it is the "door between worlds" trope. I've mentioned in other reviews that I usually find this to be a charmless, hackneyed plot device. I despise The Wizard of Oz, Chronicles of Narnia, and Alice in Wonderland. The only time it has worked for me is in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and in the movie Labyrinth (and that probably has more to do with David Bowie in tight pants than anything else . . .). So when our hero, Eric Albright, opens a door between our world and that of Levaal without immediately find a well-endowed Bowie on the other side, well, you can imagine my disappointment.

And, finally, the third strike: The Pilgrims is a standard quest novel that for, inexplicable reasons, has been split into a trilogy. Here's what I hate about series quests: the first book will be all "a questing we will go, a questing we will go, no resolution, yo, a questing we will go"; the second book will continue in the same vein until the last 50 pages when, wtf, you mean shit's going to start happening now?; and the last book, if one makes it that far, might actually be fairly decent. But the reader has to drag ass through the first two books before there's any payoff in sight. I don't like to be toyed with thus.

So, if you're new to fantasy, you might want to give The Pilgrims a whirl, but fantasy veterans need not apply.

BLUE ANGEL BY DONALD SPOTO

Blue Angel by Donald Spoto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”It is a woman’s job to sense the hungers in men and to satisfy them without, at the same time, giving so much of herself that men become bored with her. It is the same with acting. Each man or woman should be able to find in the actress the thing he or she most desires and still be left with the promise that they will find something new and exciting every time they see her again.” Marlene Dietrich


Marlene Dietrich was obsessed with lighting her whole career. She always demanded a full length mirror to be just off stage so she could check to see if the lighting was perfect.

I first saw Marlene Dietrich in the movie Morocco (1930) many, many moons ago which was exactly what Hollywood wanted me to do. The Blue Angel (1930) was held up on purpose to allow the American audience to adjust to Dietrich before they exposed them to her character Lola Lola. I watched Morrocco because of Gary Cooper. I’d just seen High Noon (1952) which is certainly one of my favorite western movies, so I watched the movie for the wrong reasons, but how wonderful it is when that happens. Recently I watched Morocco again and was captivated by the way the director Josef von Sternberg created so much mystery around the character of Amy Jolly. Dietrich would be asked to play variations of Amy Jolly/Lola Lola for the rest of her career. So what magic happened in Morocco?

”So von Sternberg and cinematographer Lee Garmes presented Dietrich as a Garbo double for her first scene in Morocco. She moves toward the camera, veled, swathed in black, enveloped in nighttime fog aboard ship. The final scene of the film perfectly reverses all that, as Dietrich moves away from us, without veil or hat, dressed all in white, bathed only by the bright sunlight in the arid desert. Between these two images occurs an almost mythic transformation”.


Dietrich with Gary Cooper in Morocco.

She became Dietrich.

Hollywood felt that The Blue Angel was just TOO risque for an American audience, so it was temporarily shelved until Morocco was released. It is interesting to see Dietrich as Lola Lola with apple cheeks and certainly more weight on her frame. She isn’t fat, but the studio thought she was, and promptly put her on a weight loss program. What emerged, as the baby fat melted away, is the sculptured features of a great star.


Dietrich in Blue Angel.

She was heralded as the next Greta Garbo an illusion to the deadpan expressions on both their faces. She didn’t mind the comparison because she respected Garbo’s work and at this point in her career she needed any help she could get to build credibility with studios and fans. Later though after she had become MARLENE DIETRICH a waiter mistook her for Garbo and she promptly left with her entourage and never returned to that restaurant.

As an offsetting story to what seems like a moment of pettiness, she was in Johannesburg in a restaurant in July of 1964 and was informed that the black company chauffeur was not going to be allowed to come in and eat because of apartheid. She threw a wonderful fit that only a movie star could properly pull off, ordered two meals, skipped the luncheon, went out to the driver, and ate her meal with him.

Dietrich came of age in 1920s Berlin where sexuality knew no limits. When she came to America, despite the moralistic leanings of that country, she brought Berlin attitudes towards sex and sexual orientation with her.

”A nonchalant approach to sex was in fact considered absolutely chic and virtually a social requirement for a grownup trying to get through the unpleasantness of every day.”

She was married to Rudy Sieber and had a child named Maria. They were the perfect Dietrich beard. To say that she was sexually free is somehow an understatement. She was bisexual. Anyone, and I mean anyone she found to be attractive she saw no reason why they shouldn’t fall into bed with one another. Marriage was not a deterrent. Lovely wives of people she met would often receive a box full of violets as an expression of Dietrich’s interest.

”These flowers were a widely understood token, since the popular German poet Stefan Georg had taken the color lavender as an emblem of homosexual love and violets as markers of its erotic expression.”

I’m sure there was bafflement and lack of understanding in many cases. Some of these “heterosexual” women did make an exception to their normal orientation for a night of passion with the famous star.

Dietrich slept with a whole host of actors. To name a few, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, and Burt Bacharach. Some of these men were 25 years younger than Dietrich when they took a spin between the sheets of the temptress. There is a funny scene that was set up by the director so that Dietrich could scope out Wayne before the studio would hire him to do a picture with her.

”With that wonderful floating walk Dietrich passed Wayne as if he were invisible, then paused, made a half-turn and cased him from cowlick to cowboots, then turned to me and whispered, ‘Oh Daddy, buy me that!’”

She soon became bored with Wayne and eventually dropped him all together because…he didn’t read books. Someone who was quite capable of feeding that part of her need for bookish discourse was Erich Maria Remarque who became her lover of many years. Dietrich supported the arts and sought out artists and writers whenever she could.

”When completed, her living room had bookshelves lined with titles by William James, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Hemingway, and the walls were adorned with original art by Cezanne, Delacroix, Utrillo and Corot.”


Erich Maria Remarque and Dietrich.

I think of myself as a man of the world, but Dietrich still managed to shock me. She was so audacious and so liberated sexually that I can’t help, but admire her freedom from social constraints. During a time when a scandal would have torpedoed her career forever she managed to juggle her preference of two male lovers and one female lover, all at once, for most of her active life. She was careful to always be photographed in a group of people if she was out with one of her lovers. In fact poor Rudy, well maybe not so poor because she kept him in style for the rest of his life, was often dragged around from nightclub to nightclub with her entourage merely to dispel rumors.

She managed her image constantly. I was also struck by the work she put into any entrance she made. She would have restaurants scouted to know how best she must arrive. When she presented an academy award at the Oscars, before she would agree, she had to know from which side of the stage she would enter from because the slit in her dress, exposing those famous legs, had to be on the audience side.

”She sauntered out with her sheath skirt slit to one knee and held 2,800 people in her instep.”

She was well into her fifties at this point.


The Dietrich legs that were once more famous than her face.

During WW2 her career took one of many downturns. She had come out against her native country and the German high command was not happy with her refusal to come home. She decided to go overseas and entertain the Allied troops as did many stars at that time who were not actively serving in the military. There is this one moment where it is dark and lights can not be found to provide a stage so a ring of tanks was formed around Dietrich and the soldiers shone their flashlights on her as she performed. I just can’t even image how etherial that must have been.

She also, between performances, balanced affairs with General George “Blood and Guts” Patton and General James “Jumping Jim” Gavin. Like in all her relationships, the potential for absolute disaster is lurking constantly, but she somehow manages to massage hurt feelings and temper bouts of jealousy without ever letting things get out of control.


Dietrich with “Blood and Guts”

As with many stars I’ve read about, Clara Bow, Greta Garbo,and Hedy Lamarr to name three others, Marlene Dietrich ended up trapped in her apartment in later years. As Hedy Lamarr stated and I’ll paraphrase here: it was so devastating to see the disappointment in people’s eyes to finally meet her and not see the beautiful movie star siren she once was. The public they once adored now has become their enemy.


Marlene Dietrich in her last performance.

Dietrich was tempted out of retirement in 1979 to sing a song in the David Bowie film Just a Gigolo. She was 78 years old. As everyone gathered to watch this legend perform, the nervousness of the audience was palatable. No one knew for sure that she could still perform. Donald Spoto chose to open his bio with this scene, and I know as I get older I’m becoming an old softy, but I had tears in my eyes. She absolutely nailed it.

She wasn’t the best singer or the best actress, but once seen she was impossible to forget. The American Film Institute in 1999 named her the 9th greatest female star of all time.

”Marlene Dietrich had to rely only on a cultivated sex appeal that was provocative but never coarse, slightly naughty but never sordid. She pleased men and women in her audience by incarnating in her roles and expressing in her songs a cynicism without acrimony--by representing the ordinary adult experience of failed romance, lost love, diminished expectations. She represented what she was--the eternal love, tenacious, proud, destined for the cycles of fierce romance and eventual disappointment, hovering too closely, nurturing too much, rejected but unbitter, ever eager for restoration to favor. But most of all, she simply endured, and all the world loves a survivor.”

I couldn’t put this book down. It was simply irresistible. Dietrich was a headline almost every minute.

I also read a book about Hedy Lamarr titled Beautiful: the Life of Hedy Lamarr by Stephen Michael Shearer. Hedy Lamarr Review with Pictures of course



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Shakespeare: The Man, The Myth, The Legend

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
2007
Reviewed by Diane K. M.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars


This audiobook was a perfect companion for a long road trip. Bill Bryson, who has now written books on everything from the history of the universe to the origins of our domesticity to America in the 1920s and, perhaps most endearingly, stories of his various travels around the world, here turns his attention to William Shakespeare.

In this relatively slim volume (it's less than 200 pages), Bryson researched what few facts are known about Shakespeare and synthesized them into chapters on his childhood, his "lost years" (1585-1592), his time in London, his plays, his fame, his death and, finally, the strange claims that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him.

Like most Americans, I was first introduced to Shakespeare in high school, when we read Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and a few of his sonnets. I've read more of his plays since then, but until now I have never read a biography of the man himself. After reading Bryson's book, I feel like I know as much as any modern person can know, simply because so few facts have survived. One Shakespeare scholar told Bryson that "every Shakespeare biography is 5 percent fact and 95 percent conjecture."

Even the few surviving portraits that are purportedly of Shakespeare cannot be verified. "The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures."

I liked reading the details of Shakespeare's life, but I think my favorite chapter was the last one on Claimants. Bryson thinks he has identified the person that started what he calls the anti-Shakespeare sentiment, an American woman named Delia Bacon. Bacon became convinced that Francis Bacon actually wrote Shakespeare's plays, and in 1852 she traveled to England to try to prove that Shakespeare was a fraud. Of course, there is no evidence of this, nor of any other claimants writing Shakespeare's works, but some researchers continue to come up with theories. Bryson picks apart the claims and shows what little merit there is to them.

"The one thing all the competing theories have in common is the conviction that William Shakespeare was in some way unsatisfactory as an author of brilliant plays. This is really quite odd. Shakespeare's upbringing, as I hope this book has shown, was not backward or in any way conspicuously deprived. His father was the mayor of a consequential town. In any case, it would hardly be a unique achievement for someone brought up modestly to excel later in life. Shakespeare lacked a university education, to be sure, but then so did Ben Jonson -- a far more intellectual playwright -- and no one ever suggests that Jonson was a fraud ... When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man -- whoever he was."

I would heartily recommend this book to fans of English literature and history. It has Bryson's trademark dry wit and humorous phrasings, so Bryson fans should also be satisfied. The audio CD I had also included an interview with the author, which was delightful, as expected.

On a more alarming note, I'm nearly out of Bryson books to read. Now that will be the winter of my discontent.

Dungeon Crawl

Dungeon Crawl by Robert Bevan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When a priest hires the crew to retrieve a holy relic that has gone missing, they quickly get more than they bargained for in the form of mummies, drow, and treachery!

The Caverns and Creatures gang is back again in a short adventure. This one is a good old fashioned dungeon crawl, as the title indicates. If you've ever played an old school D&D dungeon crawl adventure, you'll know what you're getting.

The humor of the previous books is present and the characters have matured a bit. There is a good amount of action and a couple plot twists, although one was fairly predictable. Then again, this is based on D&D adventures so that's not necessarily a bad thing.

This is a pretty short book so I can't say much more without blowing some of the funnier bits. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

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The Last Policeman

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Detective Henry Palace is called to the scene of an apparent suicide, he can't shake the feeling that it's murder. But with an asteroid due to hit the Earth in six months, no one really cares and with the infrastructure crumbling, Palace has his work cut out for him...

It's taken me way too long to give Ben Winters' existential detective tale a shot. I'm kicking myself for it but the upside is the second book is already out and the third comes out in two months.

The Last Policeman could easily have been called "The Last Man Who Gives a Crap." With only six months to go, society is crumbling. When people stop doing their jobs, things go to hell in short order. With a disintegrating cell phone network, exorbitant gas prices, and extreme jail terms for most offenses, Henry Palace has his work cut out for him.

The writing is hard boiled with a taste of Herman Hesse. Palace, and most of the other cops, question what the hell he's doing trying to prove a suicide was actually a murder with only six months left on the clock. I think it's the case of one man finally getting to do what he's always wanted to do and not giving that up just because the world is going to end in half a year.

The setting were pretty well thought out. Lots of people are abandoning their jobs and going bucket list. Lots of people are committing suicide, making Palace's case a bottom priority.

The case is solveable but it's a tough nut to crack. When an insurance actuary is the victim, you know he's not living an exciting life. Palace works the case despite all the naysayers and several attempts on his life, having some meaningful moments with his sister and a friend of the victim along the way.

It's the first book in a trilogy but doesn't really feel like it. Enough seeds are sown for the two subsequent books but The Last Policeman is fairly self-contained.

It's funny. It's not often I rate a book so highly when I'm not overly fond of the main character. On one hand, I understand doing what you've always wanted to do. On the other hand, I have a feeling Henry Palace was probably a tattle-tale in grade school before graduating to hall monitor upon reaching high school. Still, I like the guy, even if he is a by-the-book tight ass.

Four out of five stars! Bring on Countdown City!


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Getting to Easy Street Is No Easy Trick

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Three out of five stars

In this, his second novel, Tom Kakonis brings together a disparate cast of odd, strange and curious characters who come together very uneasily in the hope of making one big score. Principal among them is Mitchell Morse, a former college football player and ex-cop who's spiraled downhill to the point where he's now employed as a security guard at a Fleets superstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan, chasing down shoplifters.

Before being fired from his last job, Mitch had met a fellow security guard named Jean Satterfield. Mitch has not had a lot of success in long-term relationships, but he recognizes that Jean is a special woman who appeals to him in ways that most other women haven't. Once at Fleets, though, he meets a cashier named Starla Hudek. Starla is no great beauty, but there's a sexual energy about her that Mitch cannot resist and before long, he's juggling the two women and hoping that neither finds out about the other.

As this happens, Starla's husband, a bruiser nicknamed "Meat", is released after eight years in Prison. After all those years, Meat and his former cellmate, Ducky, are anxious to make a big score. Starla wants nothing to do with her husband and desperately wishes that she'd finalized their divorce while she had the chance. But Meat forces his way back into her life and you don't say no to a guy that large and intimidating.

Meat soon decides that knocking over the Fleets store where Starla works could be his ticket to a life of luxury. He connects with an alleged criminal mastermind named Kasperson whose job it will be to formulate the actual plan. Kasperson, at the moment, is posing as a doctor who specializes in reversing male baldness. The conspirators soon decide that they will need an inside man to help pull off the job, and Meat orders Starla to use her considerable sexual prowess to lure Mitch into joining the team.

What follows is an hilarious and entertaining romp, filled with double and triple crosses. Three million dollars is at stake here and with a score that large, you never know who you can trust. This is a book that should appeal to a lot of crime fiction fans, especially those who enjoy the work of writers like Kakonis's fellow Detroit author, Elmore Leonard.

Not Quite As Wonderful As The Film

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A wonderful tale for its time, this book has transcended its own intentions and exploded into an iconic creation that continues to instill its fans with cherished, lifelong memories.



Although I usually prefer the original books over their movie adaptions, I have to hand it to the film this time. The Wizard of Oz took the best from the source material and embellished what was missing, adding what they needed to in order to create a truly magical experience that has endured to this day.



The book and the movie are not the same. Yes, you'll find some icon elements from the movie in the book, but whereas the movie is about as tightly scripted as it gets, the book meanders and includes some completely unnecessary encounters.

Unnecessary and violent too! Killer bees, crows pecking out eyes and the tin woodman slaying dozens of wolves! Oh my! I read somewhere that Baum had intended this book to be an alternative to children's tales of the past, which often included some rather violent material. Either I've been misled or Baum's aim was off. The tin woodman's wasn't, I'll tell ya that much!

If the writing were a bit better these asides - that don't further the plot, but only enhance the adventure (not a terrible thing in and of itself) - could've been overlooked. Granted he was writing for kids, but Baum was also trying something new here and his tentative steps show it. The writing improves in future volumes, I'm happy to say!

Apparently more Oz stories had not been planned, but after a few years of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz being published, the letters being received from young female fans had become so numerous that Baum was compelled to turn this one-off book into a long series. We're lucky he did!

Marvelous Indeed

The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A straw king? Transgender issues addressed? What in the heck's a wogglebug? Heaven knows what's going on here, but I like it!

Strange though it may sound, I preferred this sequel over the first book in L. Frank Baum's Oz series, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from which most of Dorothy's famous story was drawn from to create the fantastic film The Wizard of Oz.

I'm beginning to think my reaction to the first book may have been prejudiced! You see, having only known the land of Oz from the movie, I was expecting that Oz, but that's not what The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is, not entirely.

After getting over that slight disappointment, I was able to relax and enjoy The Marvelous Land of Oz with its storyline completely unknown to me, its numerous unfamiliar characters and its delightful surprise ending.



Just like the first book, the narrative follows a similar "road trip" path in which the principle characters must journey on and on, overcoming occasional obstacles on their way to save the day, all culminating in a very enjoyable adventure indeed!


A bit of the old under the microscope treatment...

One point I'll focus in on in particular was the sexism/feminism. For the time in which it was produced (pre-women's suffrage) I wasn't too surprised to see stereotypical depictions of women, or more specifically, girls. However, I was happy to see various forms of female empowerment balancing it out. That sort of sensitivity towards gender issues seems rare for its time. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. After all, Baum was writing with a female audience in mind, as that's where his fan base overwhelmingly lay.

The Cutting Room

Louise Welsh

Canongate U.S.

Reviewed by: Nancy

3 out of 5 stars

Summary

When Rilke, a dissolute and promiscuous auctioneer, comes across a collection of highly disturbing photographs during a house clearance he feels compelled to unearth more about the deceased owner who coveted them.

Driven to discover whether the images represent a real event or a fantasy, Rilke is drawn into a nether world of illicit urges and powerful obsessions.

A compulsive journey of discovery, decadence and deviousness follows.


My Review

Rilke is a gay auctioneer in his 40’s, who enjoys drinking, smoking, and casual sex. While clearing out the house of his latest client, an elderly woman, he comes across a collection of erotic books and photos that belonged to her deceased brother. She doesn’t want to see any of it and asks that he destroy everything in his private study. Instead of honoring her request, he wishes to learn more about the disturbing images of a woman that appears to have been murdered. During his search for the truth, he encounters drug dealers, porn shop owners, an amateur filmmaker, and a woman who poses nude for the camera.

This was a very stylish, moody, and atmospheric thriller. I enjoyed the glimpse at a dark and seedy side of Glasgow, the workings of an auction house, and the deeply flawed character of Rilke. What I didn’t enjoy so much was the weak mystery, the flat secondary characters, and the ending that fizzled out and left me rather disappointed.

Still, I would recommend this story to readers who enjoy literary crime novels, morally challenged characters, and don’t mind graphic and disturbing situations.

Poetically Written, But Lacking Heart

Red Sky in Morning
by Paul Lynch
Published by Little, Brown and Company

Reviewed by Amanda
2 Out of 5 Stars

Red Sky in Morning has rightfully earned comparisons to the terse, brutal writing of authors like Cormac McCarthy and Daniel Woodrell. This is a bleak story and a pervasive sense that all will not be well by the end hangs over every melancholy word. This is a book that I should have liked and why it didn't resonate with me is something I've been pondering for a few days.

Set in Ireland during the 1800's, the novel begins with the classic conflict between tenant and landowner--only this conflict ends in an accidental death that costs Coll Coyle not just his farm, but his family and his country. Fleeing from vengeance in the form of a foreman named Faller, Coll is forced to leave Ireland and sail to America, where brutal work and animosity against the Irish awaits. However, Faller is a single-minded hunter willing to pursue his quarry across the ocean and will not rest until Coll has paid for his crime.

Of course, the tale of a man trying to outrun the sins of his past and the weight of regret through a physical journey is not a new one. And I think that's part of the problem here. This is an oft told story and, to my mind, it's been compellingly told by other authors--McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain come to mind. Red Sky in Morning never delves into the relationship between man and God, good and evil, sin and forgiveness with McCarthy's philosophical complexity, nor does it use the landscape as evocatively as Frazier does in revealing Inman's inner turmoil as the sinner hoping for salvation in a world gone to hell.

There is no doubt that Lynch can write beautifully, which is both a strength and weakness of the novel. While in Ireland, the harsh landscape bears silent witness to Coll's failings, refusing him shelter or succor from his sins. This idea of land as witness to the frailties and failings of man seems Hemingway-esque in a The Sun Also Rises sense; there's the feeling that, for all man's follies, only the earth abides. Lynch's depiction of this landscape is poetic, but begins to veer into a tedious purple prose before it mercifully shifts to the sea voyage, which picks up the pace as dialogue and plot begin to take the reins. I had also hoped that Ireland itself would be more present in the novel, but only a third of the book takes place in Ireland and, other than the Irish dialect and colloquialisms, the story could have easily taken place in any other European country in the 1800's.

Ultimately, though, my disappointment with the novel comes down to this: there is no one here to champion. None of the minor characters are likable and, while Coll is undoubtedly a victim in a system that has robbed him not just of his power, but of his humanity, he's also not a sympathetic character. Refusing to take any form of responsibility for his actions, putting those he loves at risk, and leaving his family behind (with only the occasional pang of regret or remorse; he goes chapters without thinking of his wife and children) make it difficult to connect with him. There is also the odd device of providing his wife with a very limited voice periodically throughout the novel. These chapters feel wedged into the narrative and serve only to reveal the source of the conflict that led to Coll's downfall. To read more about her life in the aftermath of Coll's desertion may have provided more of an emotional touchstone for the reader and salvaged something from the novel.