Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week the awards sided with Updike's sensibilities. A Man in Full lost to Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. Wolfe was at a party in Atlanta, where his new novel is set, avoiding the scythes...
...years old the first time Master Georgie ordered me to stand stock still and not blink...Mr. Hardy didn't have to be told to keep still because he was dead." And with no further ado, British author Beryl Bainbridge presents the first morbid snapshot in her 16th novel, Master Georgie (Carroll & Graf; 190 pages; $21), a deadpan tale of secrets and lies set in Liverpool and the Crimea in the 1840s and '50s. The story is told in alternating chapters by three characters: Myrtle, an orphan, in love with George, a doctor and amateur photographer; Pompey Jones, George...
Following The Birthday Boys, a story about Robert Falcon Scott's deadly trek to the South Pole, and Every Man for Himself, about the sinking of the Titanic, Master Georgie completes an ambitious trilogy of novels that dissect great examples of human folly. But to say that Bainbridge--who is perhaps one of the best living novelists Americans don't know much about, and whose work, including this latest novel, has been shortlisted five times for the prestigious Booker Prize--writes historical fiction is like saying that Jane Austen wrote domestic comedies. These three novels, each around a mere...
After The Birthday Boys, no reader will ever experience the cold in the same way, while Bainbridge's Titanic novel says more about hubris and class distinctions than any gazillion-dollar epic by James Cameron ever could. And Master Georgie reminds one, again, that war correspondents do not always get it right. As Bainbridge's group slogs across the Crimean peninsula, men and animals dropping from cholera and in battle all around them, the scene becomes surreal. At one point a soldier shows up with his ear blown off. "He kept shaking our hands in turn and saying how happy...
...doesn't say becomes almost more important than what she does; readers are left to decipher the twisted relationships of the characters--the fact that Myrtle willingly bears George's children because his highborn wife cannot, for instance--as best they can. There may be love in this novel, but there is little that is sweet...