Verwandte Artikel zu Shade: A Novel

Shade: A Novel - Hardcover

Jordan, Neil

 
9781582344829: Shade: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1582344825 ISBN 13: 9781582344829
Verlag: Bloomsbury USA, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Nina Hardy has been murdered. She dies in the garden of the house where she grew up, killed by George, her childhood friend. But her body is never found, and she remains a silent shade, watching-and retelling-the events of her life, and afterlife.

Nina's half-brother, Gregory, makes a pilgrimage home for her funeral, after some thirty years away. There he finds Janie, George's sister and the fourth member of their childhood gang. Together they struggle to make sense of Nina's death and the people they all became.

With Nina's shade as witness, they retrace a story of imaginary friends and hayrides, plays and school dances, a seemingly idyllic Irish childhood beside the mudflats of the River Boyne. As the children reach adolescence, however, they discover that the outside world cannot be kept at bay, and the fragile balance of their friendships is interrupted. Ultimately they will be torn apart by the outbreak of war, brought together again only to find that each has changed almost beyond recognition. And by the end the seemingly senseless crime with which the book begins is revealed in all its full and heartbreaking meaning.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Neil Jordan is the award-winning writer and director of such films as Mona Lisa, Interview with the Vampire, The End of the Affair, and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He is also the author of three previous novels-The Past, The Dream of a Beast, and Sunrise with Sea Monster-and a short-story collection, Night in Tunisia.

Rezensionen

Elegantly sober narration from beyond the grave ("George killed me with his gardening shears.... He held the shears to my neck in the glasshouse, and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on my throat") distinguishes this ghost story from novelist and Oscar-winning filmmaker (The Crying Game) Jordan. His gloomy tale, spanning the first half of the 20th century, begins where the story ends: Nina Hardy is murdered by her childhood friend, George, now the gardener on the estate where she spent her youth. The rest of the book looks backward, as Nina reflects on her life and the lives of her half-brother Gregory, George and George's sister, Janie. The familiar, theatrical plot—with its traumas of unrequited love across class lines, incestuous longings, war—is secondary to Nina's voice: "I am everywhere being nowhere, the narrative sublime...." Her ghostly omniscience leads to echoing motifs, including drowned women, pendulums, dolls and childhood accidents, in "a shifting, uncertain world, where each question could be referred to an entity that wasn't there," even as the reasons behind the murder become more unsettlingly clear. Nina's ghost sometimes takes a backseat to stretches of exposition from less engaging characters, and the novel as a whole can feel dreamily disjointed. Such lapses are forgiven, though, in this otherwise daring and well-crafted whole.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Jordan is best known as the director of "The Crying Game" and other films, but he started out as a fiction writer. His fourth novel is set on the banks of the River Boyne, in Ireland, and opens, in 1950, with a murder. The victim is Nina Hardy, a middle-aged actress, who has returned from America to live in the riverside mansion where she and her half brother grew up. The murderer (revealed at the outset) is a childhood friend who, along with his sister, lived on the opposite bank of the river. The first half of the novel tells the story of the quartet's childhood friendship, an idyll that ends when the boys go off to fight in the First World War and Nina runs away to join an acting troupe. Jordan's writing is atmospheric and filled with memorable images, but the second half of the novel, building toward the murder, sometimes feels perfunctory.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Jordan's latest novel is a lyrical experiment in point of view. It begins with actress Nina Hardy's death--her head hacked off with garden shears, her body lowered into a septic tank. But Nina remains, narrating as a ghost. She is everywhere and nowhere, and to her, the past is as immediate as the present. During her privileged childhood, she forms a fast foursome with George and Janie, poor kids from across the river Boyne, and Gregory, her late-discovered half brother. (The children shiver at a ghostly presence they call "Hester"--is it Nina, looking back?) They're soon separated by class and ability, by war, by brutally punished mistakes. In the present, Gregory returns to hold a funeral and wake the body that was never found. It's not surprising that Jordan, writer and director of The Crying Game and Michael Collins, would have a lot to say about identity and sexuality, acting and observing, and politics. But as this quiet novel steps surely toward its powerful conclusion, it's also a testament to the simple but profound power of storytelling. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Verlag
Bloomsbury USA
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1582344825
ISBN 13 
9781582344829
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
WordUnited GmbH
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