Amazon.co.uk Review
Beryl Bainbridge seems drawn to disaster. First she tackled the Unfortunate Scott expedition to the South Pole in
The Birthday Boys; later (but emphatically pre-DiCaprio) came the sinking of the Titanic, in
Every Man for Himself. Now, in her third historical novel (and her 16th overall), she takes on the Crimean War, and the result is a slim, gripping volume with all of the doomed intensity of the Light Brigade's charge--but, thankfully, without the Tennysonian bombast. "Some pictures," a character confides, "would only cause alarm to ordinary folk." There's a warning concealed here, and one that easily disturbed readers would do well to heed: Master Georgie is intense, disturbing, revelatory--and not always pretty to look at.
Bainbridge's narrative circles around the enigmatic figure of George Hardy, a surgeon, amateur photographer, alcoholic and repressed homosexual who counters the dissipation of his prosperous Liverpool life by heading for the Crimean Peninsula in 1854. His journey and subsequent tour of duty are told in three very different voices: Myrtle, an orphan whose lifelong loyalty to her "Master Georgie" becomes an overriding obsession; Pompey Jones, street urchin, fire-eater, photographer and George's sometime lover; and Dr. Potter, George's scholarly brother-in-law, whose retreat from the war's carnage and into books takes on a tinge of madness.
United by a sudden death in a Liverpool brothel in 1846, these characters plumb the curious workings of love, war, class and fate. In between, Bainbridge frames an unforgettable series of tableaux morts: a dying soldier, one lens of his glasses "fractured into a spider's web"; a decapitated leg, toes "poking through the shreds of a cavalry boot"; two dead men "on their knees, facing one another, propped up by the pat-a-cake thrust of their hands." Glimpsed as if sideways and then passed over in language that is as understated as it is lovely, these are images that sear into the brain. Master Georgie is full of such moments, horrors painted with an exquisite brush. --Mary Park
Review
'It is hard to think of anyone now writing who understands the human heart as Beryl Bainbridge does' THE TIMES 'Another masterly exploration by an author at the peak of her form ...She was always good at funny dialogue and acute observation of the oddities of human behaviour, but her recent historical explorations have given full reign to her startling powers of description ... Bainbridge has never written better' DAILY TELEGRAPH
George Hardy, an affluent doctor living in Liverpool in the 1840s, attracts loyal friends from across the class divide. Myrtle, an orphaned slum-child, worships the ground he walks on. Pompey Jones, a cynical and mischievous street boy, makes the most of George's misplaced affection. George's brother-in-law, Dr Potter, a loquacious geologist, also holds him in high esteem, thinking little of following the doctor and his family to the Crimea weeks before the outbreak of war. This is a superb evocation of an age and a formative period in the history of the British Empire but, like all of Bainbridge's work, it is much more than that. It is one of those books you long to consume in one sitting. Shortlisted for the 1998 Booker prize. (Kirkus UK)
Bainbridge's 16th novel - and the third consecutive one based on historical fact (following The Birthday Boys, 1994, and Every Man for Himself, 1996) - offers perhaps the most brilliant demonstration yet of her matchless gift for storytelling concision and subtle suggestiveness. George Hardy is a successful Liverpool surgeon and amateur photographer - and a closeted, depressed alcoholic and homosexual who will seek his manhood by volunteering his services to soldiers wounded during the Crimean War. We learn these facts, if little else about Hardy, in six chapters narrated by the three people who believe they know "Master Georgie" best: the orphan girl Myrtle (adopted by the Hardy family), who devotes her life to him, even unto surreptitiously bearing the children his barren wife claims as their own; his brother-in-law Dr. Potter, a geologist and classical scholar whose portentous mid-Victorian homilies can neither explain nor even reach the distracted George; and Pompey Jones, a resourceful street-urchin and performer (specializing as a "fire-eater") whose accidental entry into the doctor's life makes him the latter's all-purpose assistant, and occasional lover. From a deftly understated narrative keyed to six glancingly described photographs (each marking an important moment in her "hero's" life), Bainbridge creates a haunting picture of a world in which human relationships are ruled by accident and people's understanding of others is decisively distorted and limited by their own inner natures. The great events (such as the Charge of the Light Brigade) and figures (Florence Nightingale) of the Crimean ordeal linger faintly in the background as the ghastly momentum of the war's carnage (climaxing at Sebastopol) is filtered through the expertly differentiated consciousness of the three narrators. And, in a triumph of imaginative empathy, Bainbridge captures the mystery and pathos of her characters' essential aloneness in such distressing images as the sight of cherries rotting in a dead soldier's lap or our final view of Myrtle, hovering in grief "like a bird above a robbed nest." An exemplary work from one of Britain's freest writers. (Kirkus Reviews)
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