Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Polly Flint, the central figure in this civilized English novel, is six years old as it opens in 1904, an old woman at its end, in 1985her mind and imagination filled with the presence of her heroic exemplar, Robinson Crusoe. Installed by her seafaring father in a big yellow house in Yorkshire under the care of two pious aunts, she spends her life in and near that spot. Once she loved a young poet who died in the Great War; later there was a German-Jewish refugee who placed his daughters in Polly's care before he died. Events occur undramatically, related with equal weight no matter what their relative significance. Companionable though it is, the novel lacks urgency; even when Polly speaks directly with Crusoe, they exchange tepid, truistic remarks about the nature of memory and fiction, memoir and imagination. Then he is gone and the tale ends as quietly as it began. Gardam's award-winning books include God on the Rocks and The Pangs of Love. (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
After her father leaves six-year-old Polly Flint in the care of her elderly aunts, the girl is virtually marooned in a yellow house in a salt marsh in northern England. From that day in 1903 until the eve of World War II, we observe Polly's isolated existence and her obsession with her literary and spiritual ancestor, Robinson Crusoe. But Polly is never alone, and the revelations of the passions and foibles of the humans in her world are uncovered slowly in this richly textured novel. A final section, set in 1984, shows an elderly Polly in self-chosen seclusion. Although the novel lacks rousing action, much occurs on the emotional landscape. We know Polly intimately, and she haunts our imaginations as surely as Crusoe haunts hers. For academic libraries and public library patrons seeking a thought-provoking book. Kathy Piehl, English Dept., Mankato State Univ., Minn. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In previous novels and short stories, this most seductively entertaining of British novelists (The Sidmouth Letters, 1980; God on the Rocks, 1979) has tested--with both glee and a deeper wisdom--the spring and spread of strenuously decorous-to-eccentric Anglo Saxon attitudes, as well as inner muck and muddle. Here, Gardam tells an eight-decade tale, with perhaps more hortatory spine than usual, about a loving, lovable, admirable woman, marooned--by circumstance, obligation, and in a way (like that of her life-model, the fictional Robinson Crusoe), by her own rebellious nature. In 1904, Polly Flint, aged six, is brought to the Yellow House of her dead mother's sisters on the pristine marsh in northern England, by her seafaring father (who shortly after does down with his ship while waving a gin bottle). A veteran of chaotic foster homes, Polly finds it most agreeable to work on ""goodness"" for gentle Aunt Frances and bleak Aunt Mary--in spite of Mrs. Woods, that mysterious impecunious boarder with the green face, and silently toiling servant Charlotte, whose smile was clearly a ""dud."" Polly grows up good--until those crowded few days when she: discovers the joys of rebellion and imagines she sees an approving angel on the marsh; learns some discouraging physical facts about womanhood; and meets Theo, the man she will love inside-the-boy. Then, for the first time, she reads Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and elevates its hero: ""the last man on earth to endure imprisonment on an island but he came to terms with it. . . He was like women have to be almost always, on an island. Stuck. Imprisoned."" Yet she and Crusoe were ""separate and singled out."" Through the years, separate and special, Polly will see others founder on tragedy, guilt and on gallant journeys; old secrets will rise from reefs of the past; there will be times of lusty joy, rage and madness. At the last, the wild marsh is symbolically sunk in developers' detritus, and Polly's island shrinks. Still, in a closing ghostly conversation with her fictional hero, Crusoe (who gave her a life of some happy times but not love) reflects that ""there's something to be said for islands."" For Gardam fans--again a skewering humor; a fine weave of many lives; and here, a fanciful if rueful salute to a solitary, coping life, which began with abandonment and ended on a patch of island--but with all flags flying. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
