Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

A portrait of heroic failure, 07 May 2007
This is one version of the story of the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, and a moving and credible journey it is. The novel brings to life not so much the academic life of the 1930s from which this friendship orginated, but the stresses in the German upper classes at that time.

This is also the story of their marginalisation. They had lost their power and influence , but never quite realised it. The Staufenburg plot, which forms the climax of this book, epitomised their heroic failure. This novel gets into the skin of the German aristocrat, and for that alone is well worth the read. The various sub-plots are well-constructed and carry the story forward with pace. This is a very good book.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

A portrait of heroic failure, 07 May 2007
This is one version of the story of the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, and a moving and credible journey it is. The novel brings to life not so much the academic life of the 1930s from which this friendship orginated, but the stresses in the German upper classes at that time.

This is also the story of their marginalisation. They had lost their power and influence , but never quite realised it. The Staufenburg plot, which forms the climax of this book, epitomised their heroic failure. This novel gets into the skin of the German aristocrat, and for that alone is well worth the read. The various sub-plots are well-constructed and carry the story forward with pace. This is a very good book.

Painfully dull, 24 Oct 2008
I read this in my book club at work and had fairly high hopes. If it wasn't for the fact that, as an English teacher, it would look fairly poor if I hadn't read the book, I would have put it down long before the end. I found the storyline dull, the writing style drab and the characters vapid and clichéd. They wouldn't have been out of place in your average mind-numbing soap opera. Quite how an author can get away with the slim, London-based, coke-sniffing girl who works in advertising and is sleeping with an older, married man is beyond me. I didn't find one of them rounded enough to actually cause me to care what happened to them; the only benefit of that being that a rather inconclusive ending failed to leave me unsatisfied where it might have if the story had been well-written.

Not even good for a light read in my opinion.

Great Story!, 06 Oct 2008
I just don't understand the negative reviews of this book. It's well-written with sharp characterisation (admittedly the teen/twenties argot is already a little dated - but then look at some of Dickens' dialogue!)of believable people who you really care about, and a story which dovetails the disappointments and minor tragedies of ordinary life with a very English sense of the need to (in Churchill's words) keep buggering on. Perhaps you need to be of a certain age and to have experienced a real disappointment in life to appreciate the attitudes of the older characters. Certainly some of the younger protagonists seem feckless and amoral, while some of the older ones seem twisted by fate, but (in the experience of this reviewer) that's life; that's how the generations see each other. I strongly urge anyone who wants a deeper understanding of life in post-Thatcher Britain to read this novel.

dull, 23 Aug 2008
Overwritten. A shorter, wittier, crisper novel was waiting to break out of here, but it would have been a very different type of book. So we have a variation of the old Hampstead drawing room novel (transplanted to Islington, Cornwall, and New York), cluttered with perceptions of contemporary life, characters I couldn't really believe in, and a plot about an art theft I couldn't get excited about. I don't usually like to review things negatively, but in this case the number of rave reviews (on the book's cover) needs to be balanced out.

Promised but not achieved, 17 Apr 2008
We read this book in our book group, and the majority verdict was that it is a lazy, sometimes badly written book which fails to work out its themes with any conviction.In addition there were mistakes in punctuation and spelling which suggested sloppy editing. One or two readers found the dysfunctional Judd family realistic, but on the whole (for a variety of reasons) we were disappointed.

Spectacularly dull read., 22 Dec 2007
A set of bound, lifeless, middle class ramblings. Failed to connect with any of the characters and was genuinely shocked by this after the reviews were so good. I literally had to force myself to finish this and the ending was not at all worth the bother. Please, please don't waste your money.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

A portrait of heroic failure, 07 May 2007
This is one version of the story of the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, and a moving and credible journey it is. The novel brings to life not so much the academic life of the 1930s from which this friendship orginated, but the stresses in the German upper classes at that time.

This is also the story of their marginalisation. They had lost their power and influence , but never quite realised it. The Staufenburg plot, which forms the climax of this book, epitomised their heroic failure. This novel gets into the skin of the German aristocrat, and for that alone is well worth the read. The various sub-plots are well-constructed and carry the story forward with pace. This is a very good book.

Painfully dull, 24 Oct 2008
I read this in my book club at work and had fairly high hopes. If it wasn't for the fact that, as an English teacher, it would look fairly poor if I hadn't read the book, I would have put it down long before the end. I found the storyline dull, the writing style drab and the characters vapid and clichéd. They wouldn't have been out of place in your average mind-numbing soap opera. Quite how an author can get away with the slim, London-based, coke-sniffing girl who works in advertising and is sleeping with an older, married man is beyond me. I didn't find one of them rounded enough to actually cause me to care what happened to them; the only benefit of that being that a rather inconclusive ending failed to leave me unsatisfied where it might have if the story had been well-written.

Not even good for a light read in my opinion.

Great Story!, 06 Oct 2008
I just don't understand the negative reviews of this book. It's well-written with sharp characterisation (admittedly the teen/twenties argot is already a little dated - but then look at some of Dickens' dialogue!)of believable people who you really care about, and a story which dovetails the disappointments and minor tragedies of ordinary life with a very English sense of the need to (in Churchill's words) keep buggering on. Perhaps you need to be of a certain age and to have experienced a real disappointment in life to appreciate the attitudes of the older characters. Certainly some of the younger protagonists seem feckless and amoral, while some of the older ones seem twisted by fate, but (in the experience of this reviewer) that's life; that's how the generations see each other. I strongly urge anyone who wants a deeper understanding of life in post-Thatcher Britain to read this novel.

dull, 23 Aug 2008
Overwritten. A shorter, wittier, crisper novel was waiting to break out of here, but it would have been a very different type of book. So we have a variation of the old Hampstead drawing room novel (transplanted to Islington, Cornwall, and New York), cluttered with perceptions of contemporary life, characters I couldn't really believe in, and a plot about an art theft I couldn't get excited about. I don't usually like to review things negatively, but in this case the number of rave reviews (on the book's cover) needs to be balanced out.

Promised but not achieved, 17 Apr 2008
We read this book in our book group, and the majority verdict was that it is a lazy, sometimes badly written book which fails to work out its themes with any conviction.In addition there were mistakes in punctuation and spelling which suggested sloppy editing. One or two readers found the dysfunctional Judd family realistic, but on the whole (for a variety of reasons) we were disappointed.

Spectacularly dull read., 22 Dec 2007
A set of bound, lifeless, middle class ramblings. Failed to connect with any of the characters and was genuinely shocked by this after the reviews were so good. I literally had to force myself to finish this and the ending was not at all worth the bother. Please, please don't waste your money.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

A very good novel , 21 Mar 2008
This is a fascinating novel about the unlikely friendship - and tensions - between a philosopher who distrusts ideologies and theories of history and a German aristocrat obsessed with the destiny of his country and seeking to overthrow Hitler. The story is told in a number of ways - from the vantage point of the present day, through the lens of memoir and historical reconstruction. I enjoyed it a lot.

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

A portrait of heroic failure, 07 May 2007
This is one version of the story of the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, and a moving and credible journey it is. The novel brings to life not so much the academic life of the 1930s from which this friendship orginated, but the stresses in the German upper classes at that time.

This is also the story of their marginalisation. They had lost their power and influence , but never quite realised it. The Staufenburg plot, which forms the climax of this book, epitomised their heroic failure. This novel gets into the skin of the German aristocrat, and for that alone is well worth the read. The various sub-plots are well-constructed and carry the story forward with pace. This is a very good book.

Painfully dull, 24 Oct 2008
I read this in my book club at work and had fairly high hopes. If it wasn't for the fact that, as an English teacher, it would look fairly poor if I hadn't read the book, I would have put it down long before the end. I found the storyline dull, the writing style drab and the characters vapid and clichéd. They wouldn't have been out of place in your average mind-numbing soap opera. Quite how an author can get away with the slim, London-based, coke-sniffing girl who works in advertising and is sleeping with an older, married man is beyond me. I didn't find one of them rounded enough to actually cause me to care what happened to them; the only benefit of that being that a rather inconclusive ending failed to leave me unsatisfied where it might have if the story had been well-written.

Not even good for a light read in my opinion.

Great Story!, 06 Oct 2008
I just don't understand the negative reviews of this book. It's well-written with sharp characterisation (admittedly the teen/twenties argot is already a little dated - but then look at some of Dickens' dialogue!)of believable people who you really care about, and a story which dovetails the disappointments and minor tragedies of ordinary life with a very English sense of the need to (in Churchill's words) keep buggering on. Perhaps you need to be of a certain age and to have experienced a real disappointment in life to appreciate the attitudes of the older characters. Certainly some of the younger protagonists seem feckless and amoral, while some of the older ones seem twisted by fate, but (in the experience of this reviewer) that's life; that's how the generations see each other. I strongly urge anyone who wants a deeper understanding of life in post-Thatcher Britain to read this novel.

dull, 23 Aug 2008
Overwritten. A shorter, wittier, crisper novel was waiting to break out of here, but it would have been a very different type of book. So we have a variation of the old Hampstead drawing room novel (transplanted to Islington, Cornwall, and New York), cluttered with perceptions of contemporary life, characters I couldn't really believe in, and a plot about an art theft I couldn't get excited about. I don't usually like to review things negatively, but in this case the number of rave reviews (on the book's cover) needs to be balanced out.

Promised but not achieved, 17 Apr 2008
We read this book in our book group, and the majority verdict was that it is a lazy, sometimes badly written book which fails to work out its themes with any conviction.In addition there were mistakes in punctuation and spelling which suggested sloppy editing. One or two readers found the dysfunctional Judd family realistic, but on the whole (for a variety of reasons) we were disappointed.

Spectacularly dull read., 22 Dec 2007
A set of bound, lifeless, middle class ramblings. Failed to connect with any of the characters and was genuinely shocked by this after the reviews were so good. I literally had to force myself to finish this and the ending was not at all worth the bother. Please, please don't waste your money.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

A very good novel , 21 Mar 2008
This is a fascinating novel about the unlikely friendship - and tensions - between a philosopher who distrusts ideologies and theories of history and a German aristocrat obsessed with the destiny of his country and seeking to overthrow Hitler. The story is told in a number of ways - from the vantage point of the present day, through the lens of memoir and historical reconstruction. I enjoyed it a lot.

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

a master at work, 01 Apr 2005
The first two Rabbit books didn't live up to the hype, for me, the first being awkward and a little dull, whereas the second, Rabbit Redux, was a bit implausible. The third got better with Updike's finely textured prose making the most banal of events seem worth reading about. This one, Rabbit at Rest, is just an awesome 500 page display of writing, that touches on mortality, lust and disgust, faded dreams, giving up. Updike has been funnier (in the Bech books, also massively recommended) but it takes someone special to make us so fascinated by such an ordinary everyman who messes up so easily, just like us. It was worth reading the early ones to get to this.

End of an Era, 31 Jan 2003
'Rabbit at Rest' is the final book in John Updike's 'Rabbit' series and MUST NOT BE READ BEFORE THE OTHERS!!

There's not much one can say about the plot without ruining the ending, but it will suffice to say that Updike's anti-hero (the wonderfully vivid Harry Angstrom), is now retired and battling with the side-effects of his junk food diet, as well as with his family - particularly the idiosyncracies of his son, Nelson. Here, Updike's themes are those of mortality, generational differences, and (of course) the nature of sexual relationships.

As always, Updike's prose is sharply honed and highly readable, and he eschews purple prose in order to convey the depth of his philosophical musings. On top of this, it is my firm belief that Angstrom is the most marvellously portrayed character in the contemporary American literature.

Read it, then read 'Licks of Love' - it contains a 'Rabbit' novella.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

A portrait of heroic failure, 07 May 2007
This is one version of the story of the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, and a moving and credible journey it is. The novel brings to life not so much the academic life of the 1930s from which this friendship orginated, but the stresses in the German upper classes at that time.

This is also the story of their marginalisation. They had lost their power and influence , but never quite realised it. The Staufenburg plot, which forms the climax of this book, epitomised their heroic failure. This novel gets into the skin of the German aristocrat, and for that alone is well worth the read. The various sub-plots are well-constructed and carry the story forward with pace. This is a very good book.

Painfully dull, 24 Oct 2008
I read this in my book club at work and had fairly high hopes. If it wasn't for the fact that, as an English teacher, it would look fairly poor if I hadn't read the book, I would have put it down long before the end. I found the storyline dull, the writing style drab and the characters vapid and clichéd. They wouldn't have been out of place in your average mind-numbing soap opera. Quite how an author can get away with the slim, London-based, coke-sniffing girl who works in advertising and is sleeping with an older, married man is beyond me. I didn't find one of them rounded enough to actually cause me to care what happened to them; the only benefit of that being that a rather inconclusive ending failed to leave me unsatisfied where it might have if the story had been well-written.

Not even good for a light read in my opinion.

Great Story!, 06 Oct 2008
I just don't understand the negative reviews of this book. It's well-written with sharp characterisation (admittedly the teen/twenties argot is already a little dated - but then look at some of Dickens' dialogue!)of believable people who you really care about, and a story which dovetails the disappointments and minor tragedies of ordinary life with a very English sense of the need to (in Churchill's words) keep buggering on. Perhaps you need to be of a certain age and to have experienced a real disappointment in life to appreciate the attitudes of the older characters. Certainly some of the younger protagonists seem feckless and amoral, while some of the older ones seem twisted by fate, but (in the experience of this reviewer) that's life; that's how the generations see each other. I strongly urge anyone who wants a deeper understanding of life in post-Thatcher Britain to read this novel.

dull, 23 Aug 2008
Overwritten. A shorter, wittier, crisper novel was waiting to break out of here, but it would have been a very different type of book. So we have a variation of the old Hampstead drawing room novel (transplanted to Islington, Cornwall, and New York), cluttered with perceptions of contemporary life, characters I couldn't really believe in, and a plot about an art theft I couldn't get excited about. I don't usually like to review things negatively, but in this case the number of rave reviews (on the book's cover) needs to be balanced out.

Promised but not achieved, 17 Apr 2008
We read this book in our book group, and the majority verdict was that it is a lazy, sometimes badly written book which fails to work out its themes with any conviction.In addition there were mistakes in punctuation and spelling which suggested sloppy editing. One or two readers found the dysfunctional Judd family realistic, but on the whole (for a variety of reasons) we were disappointed.

Spectacularly dull read., 22 Dec 2007
A set of bound, lifeless, middle class ramblings. Failed to connect with any of the characters and was genuinely shocked by this after the reviews were so good. I literally had to force myself to finish this and the ending was not at all worth the bother. Please, please don't waste your money.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

A very good novel , 21 Mar 2008
This is a fascinating novel about the unlikely friendship - and tensions - between a philosopher who distrusts ideologies and theories of history and a German aristocrat obsessed with the destiny of his country and seeking to overthrow Hitler. The story is told in a number of ways - from the vantage point of the present day, through the lens of memoir and historical reconstruction. I enjoyed it a lot.

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

a master at work, 01 Apr 2005
The first two Rabbit books didn't live up to the hype, for me, the first being awkward and a little dull, whereas the second, Rabbit Redux, was a bit implausible. The third got better with Updike's finely textured prose making the most banal of events seem worth reading about. This one, Rabbit at Rest, is just an awesome 500 page display of writing, that touches on mortality, lust and disgust, faded dreams, giving up. Updike has been funnier (in the Bech books, also massively recommended) but it takes someone special to make us so fascinated by such an ordinary everyman who messes up so easily, just like us. It was worth reading the early ones to get to this.

End of an Era, 31 Jan 2003
'Rabbit at Rest' is the final book in John Updike's 'Rabbit' series and MUST NOT BE READ BEFORE THE OTHERS!!

There's not much one can say about the plot without ruining the ending, but it will suffice to say that Updike's anti-hero (the wonderfully vivid Harry Angstrom), is now retired and battling with the side-effects of his junk food diet, as well as with his family - particularly the idiosyncracies of his son, Nelson. Here, Updike's themes are those of mortality, generational differences, and (of course) the nature of sexual relationships.

As always, Updike's prose is sharply honed and highly readable, and he eschews purple prose in order to convey the depth of his philosophical musings. On top of this, it is my firm belief that Angstrom is the most marvellously portrayed character in the contemporary American literature.

Read it, then read 'Licks of Love' - it contains a 'Rabbit' novella.

Thrilling, 20 Aug 2006
Despite the half predictable end, The Wall was enthrilling. what makes Sartre such a great writer is the small details, the emotions; there is so much feeling in his stories. without revealing the end, i must confess that i could not let the book go before i finished reading it. The suspense is simply immense. Its Wonderful.

The Wall - 5 great short stories, 13 May 2003
The Wall or Le Mur in French is perhaps one of the best short story collections I've ever read. All deal with the idea of existentialism and criticise the accepted bourgeois values of society.

The first story "The Wall" is set during the Spanish Civil War with Pablo, one of the prisoners, being the protagonist. The story is one about the absurdity of life - how Pablo coincidentally and accidentally causes one of his comrades to be caught even though Pablo was not aware of it at all. The second story "The Room" is much more spookier and the stereotypical bourgeois values are criticised with a woman who chooses to share the absurd world of her psychopathic husband. The best of the lot is undeniably Erostratus whereby the protagonist again rejects the accepted values of society and decides to go against society by randomly shooting people on the street. There is an autobiographical element in this book too as the main character is very much portrayed as Sartre.

Overall, the book is well worth reading especially since it isn't such a long book. Certainly, one of Sartre's best "unknown" works.

The impact a return to the past can have on the present is the theme of this delicately crafted novel by Whitbread winner and Booker nominee Justin Cartwright. Dan Silas, who has been living in his native England for the last 27 years returns to the American town where he grew up for his high school reunion. The place resonates with poignant reminders of his teenage years, not least his deeply cherished memories of Gloria, his childhood sweetheart. But a journey back cannot fail to disrupt one's perceptions of one's past, and Dan discovers that not only are his memories of his relationship with Gloria a false recording of reality but that she gave birth to their daughter soon after he left America. That daughter, of whom he never knew, is now dead, killed by a serial killer a few years previously. Furthermore, his oldest friend Gary has suffered a breakdown and now believes himself to be the brother of a dead Indian chief. Dan tries to resolve his sense of helplessness in the face of a present and a past that no longer make sense by visiting his daughter's killer in prison and by retrieving some "stolen" Indian artefacts from a museum for Gary. Cartwright explores well the dislocation Dan experiences as a consequence of this sudden radical corruption of his life and the way his necessary readjustment throws his present life into sharper focus. At times the novel suffers from a sugary American pathos that is a little cloying, and some incidents, Gary's illness for example, are treated with frustrating simplicity. Despite this, the novel is a haunting examination of the fragile relationship between experience and identity. --Perry ChaserThe impact a return to the past can have on the present is the theme of this delicately crafted novel by Whitbread winner and Booker nominee Justin Cartwright. Dan Silas, who has been living in his native England for the last 27 years returns to the American town where he grew up for his High School reunion. The place resonates with poignant reminders of his teenage years, not least his deeply cherished memories of Gloria, his childhood sweetheart. But a journey back cannot fail to disrupt one's perceptions of one's past, and Dan discovers that not only are his memories of his relationship with Gloria a false recording of reality but that she gave birth to their daughter soon after he left America. That daughter, of whom he never knew, is now dead, killed by a serial killer a few years previously. Furthermore, his oldest friend Gary has suffered a breakdown and now believes himself to be the brother of a dead Indian chief. Dan tries to resolve his sense of helplessness in the face of a present and a past that no longer make sense by visiting his daughter's killer in prison and by retrieving some "stolen" Indian artefacts from a musuem for Gary. Cartwright explores well the dislocation Dan experiences as a consequence of this sudden radical corruption of his life, and the way his necessary readjustment throws his present life into sharper focus. At times the novel suffers from a sugary American pathos that is a little cloying, and some incidents, Gary's illness for example, are treated with fustrating simplicity. Despite this, the novel is a haunting examination of the fragile relationship between experience and identity.

Breathtaking, 05 Apr 2008
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

An unhistorical historical novel, 11 Jul 2007
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.







Read it now, 14 Jun 2007
How can anyone write a book this good? Justin Cartwright struggles to write an indifferent sentence, let alone a poor book, but this one must be his best yet.
Maybe Bloomsbury don't bother too much with promoting their authors - with J.K.Rowling in the stable why should they bother?- but the fact that Cartwright is still a minority taste suggests there is something profoundly wrong somewhere. The combination of deeply moving storyline, complex and minutely thought through personal relationships and philosophical dilemmas, all written in sublime prose, make this the novel of the year for me. Instantly, this book catapults into my all time top ten and, after a second reading, I suspect it will climb higher still. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is complex, but incredibly rewarding for the intelligent, 14 May 2007
This is a story about two friends from Oxford days before the war -one and English academic one a German aristorcrat - who find
themselves separated by events. Their lives, their love affairs, their involvement in the war are investigated many years later by a young student of the academic who becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at great cost to his own marriage. In particular he is trying to find out why the friends fell out when the German, Count von Gottberg, went back to Germany and joined the resistance, and was hanged for his part in the Hitler ass assassination plot of l944. This may be one of the most intelligent, moving and possibly classic novels of the last ten years.

A portrait of heroic failure, 07 May 2007
This is one version of the story of the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, and a moving and credible journey it is. The novel brings to life not so much the academic life of the 1930s from which this friendship orginated, but the stresses in the German upper classes at that time.

This is also the story of their marginalisation. They had lost their power and influence , but never quite realised it. The Staufenburg plot, which forms the climax of this book, epitomised their heroic failure. This novel gets into the skin of the German aristocrat, and for that alone is well worth the read. The various sub-plots are well-constructed and carry the story forward with pace. This is a very good book.

Painfully dull, 24 Oct 2008
I read this in my book club at work and had fairly high hopes. If it wasn't for the fact that, as an English teacher, it would look fairly poor if I hadn't read the book, I would have put it down long before the end. I found the storyline dull, the writing style drab and the characters vapid and clichéd. They wouldn't have been out of place in your average mind-numbing soap opera. Quite how an author can get away with the slim, London-based, coke-sniffing girl who works in advertising and is sleeping with an older, married man is beyond me. I didn't find one of them rounded enough to actually cause me to care what happened to them; the only benefit of that being that a rather inconclusive ending failed to leave me unsatisfied where it might have if the story had been well-written.

Not even good for a light read in my opinion.

Great Story!, 06 Oct 2008
I just don't understand the negative reviews of this book. It's well-written with sharp char