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Bezig met laden... Unexploded (editie 2014)door Alison MacLeod (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkUnexploded door Alison MacLeod
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  ) edwinbcn | Feb 19, 2020 |  Macleod’s elegant and engaging writing looks at these issues through the live of Geoffrey and Evelyn and how their marriage is disrupted. Their love is challenge in previously unexpected ways as they see each other anew and as they also struggle to bring up their eight year old son, Philip, as he becomes involved in increasingly risky adventures with his friends. Macleod’s fine writing involves the reader throughout and captures the danger of the time and makes for a revealing and moving novel. camharlow2 | Aug 31, 2017 |  ) bodachliath | Nov 11, 2014 | Page 5-6 In the shop that afternoon, Evelyn had clutched Tillie's list and gathered the items as if each were a talisman against uncertainty, and if the uncertainty was great, the weight of her basket was greater still. On her journey home, she balanced an oversized box of soap flakes, a storm lamp, parcels of candles, boxes of matches, a bottle of witch hazel, first-aid provisions, bars of carbolic soar, emergency lavatory paper and a bottle of cod liver oil. As she walked, she stopped several times to shake the blood black into her right arm, though she never let go of the plait of onions that she gripped her ribcage with her left. When the King had surprised the country with his unprecedented call for a day of national prayer, it was warning enough. Whatever the BBC said, the situation could only be dire. Still, she'd procrastinated, pushing Tillie's list deep into a pocket and avoiding the town centre for most of that week - the seafront in particular, for she couldn't bear to see the boats lurching on to the beach and toppling with the wounded and the frightened. Fear was an infection - airborne, seaborne - rolling in off the Channel, and although no one spoke of it, no one was immune to it. Fifty miles of water was a slim moat to an enemy that had take five countries in two months, and Brighton, regrettably, had for centuries been hailed as an excellent place to land. Link to my blog ( )1  steven.buechler | Oct 29, 2013 |
 The adroit prose of author Alison MacLeod, who was born in Canada and now lives in the U.K., effectively establishes the slightly surreal tone of comfortable lives stripped bare by the prospect of war. The book teems with the excruciating sense that the parameters of life have changed in ways that are yet to be revealed. In this sense, MacLeod’s historical fiction reminds one of nothing so much as a chilling post-apocalyptic novel. Amid this oppressive atmosphere, the Second World War becomes an effective backdrop for the book’s inexorably unfolding domestic betrayals. The novel proceeds with a palpable sense of dread, but when MacLeod introduces the biblical story of David and Bathsheba as a comment on the Beaumonts’ strained relationship, the comparison feels inappropriately grandiose. Unexploded works best when it is at its most poignant: as a portrait of a family trying to sort out values and morality in a world where both have been turned upside down.  Her third novel, which has been included on the longlist for the Man Booker prize, was also prompted by current events; in this case, al-Qaida's terror attack on London on 7 July 2005. Yet rather than writing about the bombings directly, MacLeod has transposed the atmosphere of fear and vulnerability to her home town of Brighton in the spring and summer of 1940, as the population braced itself for the prospect of a German invasion. Focusing on the affairs of an average middle-class family – Geoffrey Beaumont, a bank manager, his wife, Evelyn, and their eight-year-old son, Philip – the novel depicts a nation anxiously awaiting zero hour. ...the novel continues to explore MacLeod's central thesis that change is the only predictable outcome of chaos: "Change was creeping under the door and through the windows of their home, persistent as gas … It was gathering over the house in spite of the purity of the day's rinsed blue sky. It was spiralling down the flue. At night as they slept, it would settle over their hearts." As an exploration of the xenophobia and neurosis unleashed in times of national crisis, Unexploded ticks along nicely. MacLeod remains one of the most astute chaoticians writing today. Unexploded takes place over one year in Brighton from May 1940 amid fears that Hitler is set to invade Britain. Geoffrey Beaumont is a banker on standby for a covert offshore mission intended to secure the future of sterling in the event that the Nazis arrive. His contingency plan for his wife, Evelyn, and their eight-year-old son, Philip, involves a sheaf of £20 notes and an envelope containing two cyanide pills buried in a tin in the garden – which comes as a shock to Evelyn. The novel’s title is suggestive of how the war ignites elements that are secretly combustible in the Beaumonts’ 12-year marriage. There’s plenty going for Unexploded – a persuasive period setting, an intricate plot, some sumptuous prose – and you can see why this year’s Man Booker judges longlisted it, but there’s also something unpalatable about how it puts an exotic stranger on the rack just so the heroine can feel more alive. Second World War novels are ubiquitous, but Alison MacLeod's Man Booker long-listed Unexploded is multi-layered, like Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, which was shortlisted for the prize in 2009. As with the latter, the author's grasp of emotions, and history of art as well as politics, lend depth and charge. MacLeod weaves her research into the narrative so that fascinating snippets of cultural and political history emerge naturally: Picasso's Guernica on show at the Whitechapel Gallery from December 1938 to mid January 1939; the Nazi propaganda broadcasts made from Germany by the Irish-American William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw"); the landing of the Dutch foreign minister on Brighton beach in a sea-plane; Virginia Woolf's suicide; the bombing of Brighton Odeon. MacLeod is potent on the devastation of war. Her second-person narrated description of a bomb explosion is viscerally powerful, hypnotising with the intimacy of the "you" form while shocking with bald facts. Her depiction of medical experiments on children in the German concentration camps horrifies with a single sentence.
On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.76)
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2013 Booker longlist: Unexploded by Alison MacLeod
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