From Publishers Weekly
Loyal fans of the prolific O'Brian may welcome the opportunity to round out their collections with this first American edition of his 1962 novel about a bohemian artist in 1930s England, but those anticipating a rollicking yarn in the tradition of the celebrated Aubrey/Maturin series will be disappointed. It's 1944 when the novel opens on Richard, pegged as an Allied agent, withstanding torture and interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo in a French prison. In his cell in between beatings, he retreats to his memories, which make up the bulk of the novel. The story casts back to his bleak childhood as son of a strict rector and his pretty wife. He studies painting in France, and eventually returns to England, facing the life of a starving artist in London. There, he falls in with a gang of thieves and becomes a forger of famous paintings, drifting along hand-to-mouth until he coincidentally meets Phillipa Bret, a wealthy socialite who becomes his patron and object of desire. By this time, the Nazis have invaded France, and at Philippa's urging, Richard tries to enlist. Poor health leaves him fit only for intelligence-a career switch O'Brian quickly glosses over. This desultory character study will thwart readers looking for action and intrigue.
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From Booklist
In 1962, several years before he set sail with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, O'Brian wrote this novel, now published in the U.S. for the first time. When the book opens, Richard Temple is being held as a spy in a German prison in France. As a survival strategy, he escapes completely into the past--his Welsh childhood, his student days, his development as an artist. Richard grows up in shabby gentility and then studies painting in France. Back in London, gifted but never able to make ends meet, he inhabits a raffish Bohemian milieu, sometimes living on the streets and sometimes resorting to forgery and theft. He falls in love with a woman who seems to point the way to both moral and financial salvation, but his illusions are shattered, and at the same time, war breaks out. Readers won't find anything here in the seafaring line, but they will find the same razor-sharp observation that characterizes O'Brian's later and more familiar work. He renders Richard's world with a painterly eye.
Mary Ellen QuinnCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
