Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...described as the best lawyer ever to write for the stage (A Voyage Round My Father), screen (John and Mary) and television (Brideshead Revisited, Rumpole of the Bailey). Now Mortimer, 62, has earned another encomium: he is the only adapter of Evelyn Waugh ever to have produced a long novel about the past 40 years of life in England...
Paradise Postponed combines some of the social sweep of Brideshead with the hugger-mugger of Rumpole, the overweight, conniving and lovable Old Bailey barrister. The novel's central mystery emerges after the death, in 1985, of Simeon Simcox, 80, Anglican rector of Rapstone Fanner, a village some two hours' driving time west of London. The clergyman's will contains a staggering surprise. He has left nothing to his wife Dorothy or his two grown sons Henry and Fred. Instead, the ardent Socialist once known as "the Red Rector of Rapstone" has bequeathed all of his shares in the family-owned...
Among these small events are the fates of his sons. Henry's first novel creates a minor ruckus and earns him a name as one of England's angry young men. He marries his younger brother's sweetheart, Agnes Salter, writes screenplays, divorces, weds an adoring younger woman and becomes a cranky old reactionary. For his part, Fred woos and loses Agnes but decides to follow her father's practice as the village doctor. His new mentor espouses a mission that frees Fred from messianic impulses: "I don't deal in right and wrong. I deal in collywobbles and housemaid...
...pros and cons, and extremely funny besides. Near the end of his life, watching TV reports of the war for the Falkland Islands, Simeon complains to his wife: "What we're doing is going round in circles. I mean, is this where we came in?" To enter this novel is to join an eddy of wisdom and comic resignation...
...most recent novel, A Family Madness, Keneally returns to the inexpungible memories of World War II, this time from the point of view of collaborators in the murder of Jews. His central characters are the Kabbelskis, a family of politically active Belorussians who make common cause with the Germans in an effort to secure an autonomous homeland for their people. They are motivated less by anti-Semitism than by the rueful lessons of a millennium of conquests from east and west. Banding together with other helpless minorities seems to offer no chance of gaining power. But connivance may. Stanislaw Kabbelski...