Word: archers
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...York society of the 1870s, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a true romantic gentleman. He is romantic because he wants to shrug off the opera cape of domestic respectability and follow his heart to hell with the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). He is a gentleman because, having already declared his love to pretty May Welland (Winona Ryder), he is bound to behave honorably. He knows that when passion and propriety collide, only bitter defeat may rise from the wreckage...
...storyteller's ancient, changeless pattern develops, working as well in Denmark and Greenland as it did for Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California and for Martin Cruz Smith and the series that began with Gorky Park in Moscow. Smilla puts her nose in harm's way and gets it bloodied. Like Archer and like Smith's Russian cop Arkady Renko, she keeps on poking. She's in peril in a glossy casino near Copenhagen, on a powerful, mysteriously equipped icebreaker plowing north toward Greenland, on the floating metal atoll of a huge fueling dock, and finally...
Saddam Hussein, at least as he is caricatured in Western demonology, is the perfect comic-book villain for Jeffrey Archer's latest summer-weight thriller. ) What's more, the Iraqi strongman has cooked up a fiendish scheme to humiliate the Great Satan: steal the Declaration of Independence from its place in the U.S. National Archives, and burn it on July 4, 1993, in Baghdad's Victory Square. Horrors! Curses! Zounds...
...words to that effect. Alas, brilliance ends with Saddam's bright idea. Even by the middling standards of pop novelists, Archer's prose is plodding and mechanical. Scenery creaks as the Washington set is wheeled out of the way and the Paris or Baghdad set is trundled in from the wings. Now and then a stagehand is visible. Characters speak lines (it seems to the reader) without force or emphasis, as if reading from scripts at a play's first run-through...
...believability, no sense that Baghdad's streets sound or feel or smell different from those of Paris or Geneva, or that a man and a woman in peril might react in different ways. This sort of frequent-flyer spy story depends on texture, and there's not much offered. Archer, who lacks the talent to get by with less than his best, writes like a man with his mind on an important lunch date...