Title: perplexing
Review: I try not to be swayed by pre-pub blurbs nor even reviews, but the raves for this book drew me to it, only to be disappointed. It has the oddest combination of sweeping and miniscule pallette. On the one hand, Christopher's inner life is stuffy and confined, almost a cliche of the male English spinister, his passions so tightly cloaked as to be painful, yet the action-sweeping across continents-encompasses war, the machinations of the opium trade, and an excrutiatingly drawn out campaign to solve childhood mysteries. The subplot of Mr. Banks' adoption of Jennifer, while affecting in itself, seems contrived to give resonance to the orphan theme. In the end, I couldn't reconcile the small inner world of this strangely withheld man with his adventures in a the world beyond himself, a world filled with almost numbing action and intrigue.
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