The Great Divorce
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Review
'Martin writes of the emotional desolation of a marriage break-up with clarity and candour. This is a powerful, challenging and draining novel.' (Simon Shaw MAIL ON SUNDAY (3.10.04) )
Product Description
Every woman holds the power to enchant or to destroy. In New Orleans, three women from completely different backgrounds face a turning point in their lives. Ellen, a vet at a New Orleans zoo, is trying to contain an infectious disease that threatens the zoo's animals. At the same time, she must come to terms with her crumbling marriage. Alongside her works Camille, an enigmatic and disturbed young woman whose terrifying fantasies threaten to overwhelm her. Finally there is Elisabeth, 'The Catwoman of St Francisville,' who was hanged in 1845 for murdering her bullying husband in horrific circumstances. In a compelling tale that bristles with energy and a sense of foreboding, their stories converge to reveal the secrets behind the 'untamed' aspects of human nature.
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Ellen looked up from the magazine. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Ellen looked up from the magazine. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I found the great style and the tension created in this book quite spel]binding. Though one begins to have suspicion what the characters problems might be, the author still holds you enthralled with the story. This I think is much due to the author's writing style. I can se a future Booker contender if he keeps this standard up
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Sensually Profound
6 Nov 2000
Format:Paperback
Sexy, absorbing and insightful, Valerie Martin's novel The Great Divorce (following her acclaimed Mary Reilly), explores the struggle for power between men and women, nature and civilization, in three mesmerizing tales of very different women whose lives are unraveling.
Ellen Clayton, the vet at the New Orleans Zoo, tries to hold on after her faithless husband of 20 years leaves her for his young secretary. Camille, lonely and depressed, looks after the big cats at the zoo and fantasizes about relationships with sexually and emotionally abusive men.
Juxtaposed with the contemporary stories of Ellen and Camille is the gothic tale of Elisabeth Boyer, the Catwoman, a Creole beauty in antebellum New Orleans who was hanged for murdering her sadistic husband.
Martin fuses these stories of betrayal into a compelling narrative about human nature, passion and animal instinct, evoking the New Orleans of both centuries with equal clarity.
Imaginative and profound, The Great Divorce is a great read that tackles important issues without sentimentality. Despite the inherent sadness and futility that Ellen, Camille and Elisabeth confront, the novel offers a note of hope. 'I think,' Ellen tells her daughter when a young jaguar at the zoo survives an illness, 'this time we win.'
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
HAUNTING AND MESMERIZING
18 May 2000
Format:Paperback
Why isn't Valerie Martin better known? Her work is absolutely dazzling. "The Great Divorce" manages to sustain a level of enjoyably creepy menace from first page to last. It weaves together the stories of three couples, all of whom end up parted in different ways. Each of these stories symbolizes the conflict between man and nature, and each gives us a preview of a different resolution to that conflict. We can part from nature amicably, we can kill it with our indifference to it, or we can be killed by its vengeance against us. This may sound heavy-handed in my telling of it, but it is far from heavy-handed in Martin's telling. The book is a work of gothic fiction, of horror fiction, of historical fiction, as well as a penetrating study of the way we live today. Martin evokes the steamy milieu of pre-Civil War New Orleans as beautifully and as convincingly as she evokes the Crescent City of today. Her language is sinuous and seductive. It has the sleek, sudden power of a jungle cat. And her storytelling skills are masterful. It is shameful that this beautiful book is already out of print. Do yourself a favor and find a used copy. You won't regret it.
The Great Divorce
31 Dec 2011
Format:Paperback
Humanity is divorced from the animal kingdom, women are divorced from men and from their own inner, animal rage.
The novel swaps between three loosely connected stories of women in New Orleans. Camille is a young employee caring for big cats the city zoo, watching as her favourite beast crashes painfully but repeatedly against her cage. Camille also does some sex work on the side. More or less friendless, she struggles for self-esteem under routine psychological blows from her alcoholic mother and from a string of desensitised males. Her openness, her longing for love and respect, expose her, of course, to many casual whallops from life, and she will surely bring out any rescue impulses in the reader. At the same time Camille has momentary but compulsive fantasies of being a wildcat. Anything could happen.
Her sensitivity is surprising, since almost everyone around her is blunted. It could be seen as the result of a childhood spent watching out for the moods of an aggressive parent.
Someone who could potentially help and guide her is the second main character, Ellen, a vet at the zoo, and the mother of a 14 year old girl. But Ellen is sinking into depression as one of her smug husband's affairs gets serious, and, yes, a divorce looms. The smug husband is an historian researching the sensational murder of a C19th southern German slaveowner, whose throat had been torn open. Convicted for the crime was his young wife, Elisabeth, fresh from the French quarter. Elisabeth is the novel's third main protagonist as it slips back now and then to her era. Elisabeth and her slaveowner husband had each entered wedlock expecting to subdue their spouse without undue trouble, but when his brutishness emerges so does the hideous inequality of their social positions - with the realities of slavery vivid in the background.
I found this an uneven novel. The interesting Camille rescues it to a large extent extent, but Ellen and especially her husband are wooden, stock-in-trade characters of the more lead-pipe kind of feminist fiction, and the southern history section is also rather just-so. To that extent it was disappointing, after the freshness of some of Valerie Martin's other novels.
The novel swaps between three loosely connected stories of women in New Orleans. Camille is a young employee caring for big cats the city zoo, watching as her favourite beast crashes painfully but repeatedly against her cage. Camille also does some sex work on the side. More or less friendless, she struggles for self-esteem under routine psychological blows from her alcoholic mother and from a string of desensitised males. Her openness, her longing for love and respect, expose her, of course, to many casual whallops from life, and she will surely bring out any rescue impulses in the reader. At the same time Camille has momentary but compulsive fantasies of being a wildcat. Anything could happen.
Her sensitivity is surprising, since almost everyone around her is blunted. It could be seen as the result of a childhood spent watching out for the moods of an aggressive parent.
Someone who could potentially help and guide her is the second main character, Ellen, a vet at the zoo, and the mother of a 14 year old girl. But Ellen is sinking into depression as one of her smug husband's affairs gets serious, and, yes, a divorce looms. The smug husband is an historian researching the sensational murder of a C19th southern German slaveowner, whose throat had been torn open. Convicted for the crime was his young wife, Elisabeth, fresh from the French quarter. Elisabeth is the novel's third main protagonist as it slips back now and then to her era. Elisabeth and her slaveowner husband had each entered wedlock expecting to subdue their spouse without undue trouble, but when his brutishness emerges so does the hideous inequality of their social positions - with the realities of slavery vivid in the background.
I found this an uneven novel. The interesting Camille rescues it to a large extent extent, but Ellen and especially her husband are wooden, stock-in-trade characters of the more lead-pipe kind of feminist fiction, and the southern history section is also rather just-so. To that extent it was disappointing, after the freshness of some of Valerie Martin's other novels.
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