British Summertime (Gollancz S.F.) by Paul Cornell  (8)

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Product Description
In the far future, Britain is a divided land, ruled by the great families. In the wilderness between the cities lies Heartsease, a grand country estate, now quite empty, but mysteriously well-tended. Reverend Jane Bruce of the Reformed Church of England is sent to bless the house for a family who wish to occupy it. But there's something her soldier bodyguard isn't telling her about the house's past. Booth Hawtrey, cursed to live forever, is investigating the house for the alien masters who have turned him into something not quite human. But why is their concern at once so urgent and so trivial? David Hawtrey, decadent and hedonistic militiaman, has dangerous plans for the house. But are they truly his own? Rebecca Champhert is Booth's biographer, David's ex-lover and Jane's unwilling victim. And it's up to her to unravel the story of Heartsease, a story that takes in the history of Britain, the gap between life and death, and the future of the human race.

Synopsis
In the far future, Britain is a divided land, ruled by the great families. In the wilderness between the cities lies Heartsease, a grand country estate, now quite empty, but mysteriously well-tended. Reverend Jane Bruce of the Reformed Church of England is sent to bless the house for a family who wish to occupy it. But there's something her soldier bodyguard isn't telling her about the house's past. Booth Hawtrey, cursed to live forever, is investigating the house for the alien masters who have turned him into something not quite human. But why is their concern at once so urgent and so trivial? David Hawtrey, decadent and hedonistic militiaman, has dangerous plans for the house. But are they truly his own? Rebecca Champhert is Booth's biographer, David's ex-lover and Jane's unwilling victim. And it's up to her to unravel the story of Heartsease, a story that takes in the history of Britain, the gap between life and death, and the future of the human race.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   20 of 24 people found the following review helpful: Something Stunning, 22 Aug 2001 By A Customer Sit back, read this book, and let your mind expand. I finished reading this five days ago, and it's still swimming through my head. The size of Cornell's imagination is breathtaking; he takes the concepts of science and religion, and fuses them into a brand-new mythology. And while this is sustained and explained with immaculate precision, at the same time the epic is made utterly intimate, as Cornell writes with compassion and humanity. But I don't read a novel for concepts alone, it's the characters I care about, and this is the author's true skill - creating complex, flawed, fascinating people who linger in the mind long after the final page has been turned. There's Jane, brave and scared, her life unravelling backwards throughout the book. Booth Hawtrey, an immortal twentieth-century lad, swaggering through the centuries. And timid, doubting Jane, whose death is just the beginning of her adventure. Even the house, Heartsease, is a character in itself, biding its time until the horrifying reason for its existence is revealed. Cornell has the skill to take these characters, twist them round, turn them inside-out, expose their worst faults... and then forgive them. In the end, it's the actual detail of the writing, the prose itself, that leaves me astonished. This book is a truly wonderful read, as sentences explode like tiny, smart bombs. With certain set pieces, Cornell lets fly; a bullet penetrates a skull in unnerving detail; a civilisation topples in the space of a single page, convincingly; a woman is physically hurtled into space, and you believe every word. In the final quarter of the novel, the combination of characters, concepts and prose ignites. Cornell's confident enough to rely on the thrills of a good old-fashioned adventure to hurtle towards his climax. In the end, I simply envy anyone about to read Something More for the first time.